13 minute read
John richard stephens interview
John Richard Stephens, a resident of Hawaii, is the author/editor of 23 books, including Wyatt Earp Speaks, Gold, Commanding the Storm and The Wildest Lives of the Wild West. John’s books
have been recommended by the Preferred Choice Book Club, the Quality Paperback Book Club, the Book of the Month Club and the Civil
War Trust.
For his new project, Mark Twain’s Hawaii: A Humorous Romp through History (TwoDot, July 2022), Stephens traces Twain’s journey through the island just as he experienced it in 1866. In this exclusive interview, NOW spoke to Stephens about the formative nature of the author’s trip, the world’s impression of Hawaii and Twain’s views on the British.
NOW:
As you explain early in Mark Twain’s Hawaii, Twain clearly held great desire to visit Hawai‘i for a while prior to his maiden trip. Why do you think the islands particularly appealed to him?
Stephens: Twain was enticed by the idea of carefree living on peaceful, laid-back islands, escaping the drudgery of being a newspaper reporter in San Francisco. Twain always joked about how lazy he was, but my impression is that he just wanted to be free from the stress and pressures of society. Americans knew Hawai‘i was an exotic paradise. The US had business interests there and the missionaries in Hawai‘i regularly conducted fund raising tours in the states, so news from the islands regularly appeared in just about every newspaper.
Twain’s first impressions of Hawai‘i were formed as a boy in Missouri when he was asked in Sunday school to donate pennies to help convert and educate the “savages”, despite the fact that they had already converted en masse and were actually more literate than many Americans. A year or two before he left for the islands in 1866, Twain became good friends with Charles Warren Stoddard, who was then a poet and later became a famous travel author. Stoddard had just returned from touring the South Seas and was loaded with stories. Twain
knew other people who had gone there and dreamed of going himself, but he turned down his first chance because of commitments. He
almost immediately regretted it and within two months finagled a second chance.
NOW:
Twain was still a relatively young man when he undertook the trip, around 10 years away from writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Could you sum up his circumstances – and the direction his life seemed to be heading – in 1866?
Stephens: Twain left school after the fifth grade when his father died to become an unpaid printer’s assistant for local newspapers. When he was eighteen, he set out on his own working for newspapers in New York City, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. Then he changed careers and became a riverboat pilot on the
Mississippi River.
When the Civil War halted trade on the river, he and his brother headed to what was then
Facing (left): The book’s cover
Facing (right): Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. By Kenneth C. Zirkel - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https:// commons.wikimedia. org/w/index. php?curid=21778275
the Nevada Territory where he soon became a minor reporter for newspapers there and in San Francisco, but he kept landing himself in hot water with newspaper feuds, provocative humour, and attacks on police corruption and racism. After skipping through the frying pan a couple of times – having to temporarily flee both Nevada and California – he felt it was a good time to go exploring.
On the other hand, he was building up a name for himself as a humorous writer on the West
Coast. His excursion to Hawai‘i to write a series
of 25 articles for the Sacramento Union allowed
him to expand his talents as he experimented with travel writing, business journalism, society reporting, and critical opinion pieces, although he couldn’t help throwing in some fiction, satire, and lots of humour. He developed a casual, intimate style that his readers found very refreshing.
NOW:
You mention in your introduction that you sadly had to winnow down your Twain material to the most relevant parts. Do you have any favourite Twain stories or anecdotes that you couldn’t include? Originally I intended to include everything he wrote concerning Hawai‘i, but I found that would have added an addition hundred pages to the book, so I very carefully had to trim it. Still, I made sure I kept all of the best material and I even devised ways to keep a few good best bits that aren’t quite related to the islands. I doubt that anyone will miss what I had to leave out. I also felt I needed to add background information and explanations to provide a full understanding of the history and culture of Hawai‘i to illuminate what Twain was experiencing and sometimes didn’t comprehend. Hawaiian culture is particularly fascinating. NOW:
Finding and collating this quantity of Twain’s material must have been a herculean challenge. Were there any sources that proved particularly tricky to hunt down?
NOW:
What do you think people who enjoy Twain’s more popular work, but know little of his time spent travelling in Hawai‘i, will gain from reading your book?
Stephens: Twain was the quintessential American. He was part Southerner, Midwesterner, Westerner, and New Englander. And he was very funny. You take him halfway around the world and drop him in the middle of a totally alien culture in a place that’s like heaven on earth, where he’s suddenly surrounded by rain forests, amazing sights, weird food, scantily clad maidens, rainbows, tikis, skeletons, volcanoes with fiery lava, ancient gods, and long sandy beaches dotted with swaying palm trees. Where else can you read about Twain’s experiences at a nude beach? He even tried surfing. It’s a perfect recipe for a great book that will easily hold your interest.
Stephens: The accounts written by people who met him while he was traveling through the islands originally appeared a long time ago in small publications and privately printed books, many of which were difficult to get a hold of, but research is my specialty and over four decades I’ve become quite good at it, having learned a number of tricks for finding obscure things with little to go on. I’m also more persistent than a bloodhound. It’s those candid accounts that
provide an unvarnished glimpse into Twain’s personality and add a whole new dimension to
NOW:
Hawai‘i was, as you note in your book, a Kingdom at the time. Could you sum up the prevailing attitude of the time from Hawaiians to foreigners, and Americans specifically?
Stephens: Native Hawaiian culture was, and to some extent still is, extremely generous. Twain relates how he witnessed a Hawaiian row his canoe over
treacherous and stormy seas to the boat he was on, just so the Hawaiian could give the Captain some chickens, refusing payment. When such a giving culture was confronted by the Western taking culture, it was stressful and adjustments had to be made, particularly as the taking culture began to dominate life on the islands.
The Hawaiians were acutely aware of how small their kingdom was and they dreaded that it could be taken away from them. A rogue British officer actually did take over the country for a few months, but his superior restored it. Then the French invaded and threatened it. Finally a group of businessmen, backed by US marines, overthrew the monarchy and established a republic, with it eventually being absorbed into the United States. Much like the Native Americans, just about everything was taken away from them by a handful of foreigners, but the country was thoroughly Christian, so they didn’t fight back.
NOW:
Twain’s early correspondence is littered with falsehoods about Hawaiians. While Twain took
care to correct these later on, presumably such stereotypes and falsehoods were common at the time. Is it fair to say that Hawaiians were widely dismissed as a primitive people in the 1860s? If so, when did this general perception start to change?
Stephens: I’d say it really didn’t begin to change until the 1970s with the rise of the Hawaiian cultural
movement. Things are considerably different now, but most people still know very little about the Hawaiians, their culture, or their history. Of course throughout history there have always been people close to the Hawaiians who’ve known it all along, but the general public tends to rely on stereotypes. Even in Hawai‘i there are big gaps in people’s knowledge and understanding, which is why I felt it was important to include that in this book. This is my third book on Hawai‘i, so I’ve written bits about it before, but I’ve mostly researched it on my own just because I personally find it very interesting. It was nice to be able to incorporate more of it into this book. I think people will find it eye-opening.
NOW:
It is noticable throughout his time on the islands that Twain seemed to be immediately liked by most he met, even amongst those who had not previously heard of him. What was it about Twain the person, not the writer, that so enraptured and intrigued people, do you think?
Stephens: Twain was awkward, clumsy, and spoke very slowly with an unusual drawl. People who didn’t know him often thought he was drunk. Yet he captured their attention with humorous stories and outlandish anecdotes. He was so funny that people were immediately drawn to him. People were mesmerized by him.
Franklin Austin, who was a boy when Twain stayed at his ranch on Hawai‘i Island, which we usually call the Big Island, put it best when he wrote, “I cannot help remarking the strange, apparently hypnotic influence this man’s personality shed about him upon everyone, for sheer joy, happiness and gladness by simply being in his presence.[…] even the tall, handsome athletic Kanaka, who had just guided him out of the canefields, with bright happy eyes, and who could not understand what he said, just laughed from sheer joy when he looked at him, and Kekau, the faithful and solemn, would look at him, lingeringly, with his one bright eye and, as was his nature, in his doglike way, would surely have cheerfully laid down his life for him if he had ever been in a fix. He seemed to have
a personal and voiceless affinity for all things natural and human.”
NOW:
Mark Twain’s Hawaii reads like a love letter to
Hawai‘i, via both yours and Twain’s writings. Does your love of Hawai‘i predate discovering Twain’s, or are the two linked?
Stephens: It predates it, but there’s something universal going on here. Jack London, another of America’s greatest writers, described it best when he wrote, “Somehow, the love of the Islands, like the love of a woman, just happens. One cannot determine in advance to love a particular woman, nor can one so determine to love Hawai‘i. One sees, and one loves or does not love. With Hawai‘i it seems
always to be love at first sight. Those for whom the Islands were made, or who were made for the Islands, are swept off their feet in the first moments of meeting, embrace, and are embraced. […] Truly, Hawai‘i is a woman beautiful and vastly more persuasive and seductive than her sister sirens of the sea.”
Before my first visit, everything I knew about the islands came from the media. I knew it was
tropical and exotic, with lots of birds, flowers, and lush vegetation, but I also knew it would
Left: Twain photographed in 1908 via the Autochrome Lumiere process
Facing: Queen Lili‘uokalani (1838-1917), the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom
be expensive to go there. My girlfriend Elaine, now my wife, had been there and wanted to return. When we landed on the island of Kaua‘i, I was completely bowled over. Everything was so much greater than I could ever have imagined. Afterward I thought about returning every day and we began planning to retire there. A few years later we were able to go to the Big Island. Elaine was practically crying when we had to leave, so we dropped everything, packed up, and after exploring the four main islands, we ended up on Maui. That was in 2010. It was probably the best decision we ever made. We absolutely love it here.
For me, Twain and Hawai‘i were separate, but I realized I could bring the two together. Some of what he wrote about the islands has been
reprinted in other books, but I knew there was more. Also these books reprinted his articles in the order they were published, but Twain skipped around and mixed things up. I decided to tear everything apart and reconstruct it to try to recreate his journey as he experienced it. I’ve added dates and locations, so you can come to the islands and follow his footsteps day to day to see where he was and what he was doing. It’s amazing to stand on a spot where he once stood or walk where he walked while reading his description of what he saw and encountered.
NOW:
Do you think Twain’s time in Hawai‘i changed him? How did he subsequently reflect on its significance?
Stephens: Just as Jack London described, Twain was completely smitten with Hawai‘i and it haunted him the rest of his life. Years later in a dinner are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes; I can hear the plash of its brooks, in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”
During the construction of his mansion, he wrote in a letter to Stoddard, “The house is full of carpenters and decorators; whereas, what we really need here, is an incendiary. If the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest[…]. What I have always longed for, was the privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich Islands [Hawai‘i] overlooking the sea.”
NOW:
Late in the book, you convincingly relate Twain’s lectures to a modern stand-up comedy routine. Do you think there’s value in modern readership viewing Twain as a comedian, rather than simply a writer?
Stephens: There’s definitely value in appreciating all of his abilities. He was a great author, comedian, satirist, critic, travel writer, opinion writer, essayist, and public speaker. He wasn’t a very good newspaper reporter, though. For him, catching and maintaining people’s interest was much more important than accuracy. But his other talents more than make up for that deficiency. All of those talents feature prominently in this book. There’s even the story behind his one great news scoop. Now we remember him for his classic novels, but throughout most of his life he was primarily known as a comedian. Newspapers routinely dredged up old one-liners of his and reprinted them. Even in the early 1900s they were reprinting funny bits from his forty-yearold articles and lectures on Hawai‘i. But even his
most serious books and articles contain ironic, sardonic, and humorous flashes. That’s just who he was.
NOW:
As a Brit, I must ask: did Twain ever express any feelings on Britain or the British? I ask this with a hint of trepidation...
Stephens: Twain was very popular in Britain, stemming from his Hawai‘i lectures in the early 1870s and he eventually began publishing his books in the UK months before they came out in the States. He built up quite a following. So Brits were able to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer more than six months before it was published in America.
When he went to Hawai‘i in 1866, he was very prejudiced against the British. British soldiers had sacked the White House half-a-century earlier and patriotic fervor in the US was still very anti-British, but Twain’s prejudices were completely reversed by the time he arrived in London in 1873. He later wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” He came to love Britain.
Mark Twain’s Hawaii: A Humorous Romp through History (Hardback, 9781633887848, £20.95) edited by
John Richard Stephens publishes July 2022.
