Mark Twain - Hannibal, Missouri

Hannibal, Missouri was the boyhood home of Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Mr Twain was that most rare and delightful of creatures who is both a great writer and a great character. Like Oscar Wilde, another of the type, we remember him as much for the cool things he said and did as for the stories he wrote.

Hannibal was not only the setting for Mr Twain's boyhood, but also for two subsequent vicarious childhoods in his famous novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Hannibal has not forgotten this, and if you happened to pass through the town unawares it would be very difficult not to notice. There's the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, the Mark Twain Cave, Sawyers Creek Fun Park, the Mark Twain Family Restaurant (now proudly serving Starbucks coffee), the Mark Twain Lake, the Huckleberry Finn Diner, etc. Hannibal is a bit of a one trick pony. I'm glad I had an opportunity to visit before they change the name to Twaintown.

My favourite is the Hotel Mark Twain which, as far as I can tell, has nothing whatsoever to do with Mr Twain except that it happens to be in Hannibal.

There's even a Mark Twain Mississippi Riverboat.

There is a dinner cruise on the Riverboat that I was sorely tempted to take, in spite of the promise of live banjo music. Instead, I decided to see a stage show called Mark Twain Himself. It was the right choice.

Actor Richard Garey brings the great writer and wit back to life in a stage show that recreates the experience of one of Mark Twain's own lectures. Based on snippets from Mr Twain's books, letters and speeches, the performance is both charming and authentic. There is something of the real Mark Twain in the actor's performance, particularly in the humorous biographical stories. Richard Garey as Mark Twain tells of how he took up riding a bicycle (a pennyfarthing) comparatively late in life and was told by his friend and instructor that the hardest part of riding a bicycle is getting off it ... (pause for comic effect) ... "I did not find that to be the case."

This show was one of the highlights of my journey and I am immensely grateful to "himself" for patiently posing for photographs and autographing my book. Mine is almost certainly the only autographed 1957 edition of The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, particularly since the author died in 1910.

For the dedicated Twainophile, like me, Hannibal is well worth the visit. It is fascinating to visit the shared boyhood home of Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer and to see its famous whitewashed fence.

Right across the small street is the home of Becky Thatcher, the love of Tom Sawyer's young life.

Then there is the slow, calming presence of Mr Twain's beloved Mississippi River. This is the river he loved so much that he wanted to know all its secrets, to make his living as a river pilot for years, and to keep returning in fiction to the river he never really left. In a perfect Tom Sawyer touch, there was even a fish in the river when I looked down from the pier. If only I had a stick, line and hook!

I spent the night in a hotel that I will not name (it contains a Mark Twain reference, but that doesn't distinguish it in Hannibal). The occupants and neighbours were almost exclusively African American, perhaps descendants of Huck's friend Jim.

That got me thinking about the timeline. Slavery was abolished in Missouri on January 11, 1865, almost a year before the Thirteenth Amendment was enacted. My grandparents were born in the 1920s. Their grandparents were born in the 1870s. That means that the people at the hotel, most of whom are older than me, are maybe only 4 or 5 generations from slavery. Huckleberry Finn's moral angst about aiding a runaway slave was current affairs for Mark Twain, who was about my age when slavery was abolished. No wonder Mark Twain feels like a contemporary thinker despite his slightly antiquated language. It wasn't very long ago, in this place, that the great, great grandparents of the people next door would probably have been someone's property.

This is why controversy about whether young people should be allowed to read Huckleberry Finn, which contains naughty words like nigger, is preposterous. Everyone should read it as soon as they're old enough to count on their fingers the generations between then and now. That's the burden of modern history, which is all the more uncomfortable for being so close to living memory.