New show reframes Mark Twain’s work for contemporary audiences

Even 150 years ago it was a dream job for a newspaper correspondent: Sail to Hawaii — the Sandwich Islands — and write about its people and places in a series of letters for the Sacramento Union. How could Samuel Langhorne Clemens resist?

When the mustachioed Missourian boarded the steamer Ajax in 1866, he signed on with the pseudonym that would later make him famous. And with that, Mark Twain began a romance with the place he famously called “the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.”

This year marks the sesquicentennial of that trip, which lasted from March 18 to July 19, 1866, and gave Americans their first detailed description of Hawaii. Call Twain a travel writer if you want — the title fits.

Twain wrote 25 letters in Hawaii — about 90,000 words — and sent them by ship to the mainland and the Sacramento Union, which shared them with other newspapers in the west. They are thoroughly Twain: funny, wry and observant. They are also thoroughly of the period and occasionally rely on descriptions of people and practices that are not respectful of Hawaiian culture — from the bleached bones left for decades on an old Oahu battlefield to the “dusky native women” and “savages” the writer encounters.

Twain, who was only 31, wrote about royalty, missionaries and Native Hawaiian women who swept by on horseback “free as the wind,” lounged beneath shade trees and bathed naked in the sea. To walk the streets of Honolulu, Twain wrote, with its “balmy fragrance” of jasmine and oleander, was to walk in “a summer calm as tranquil as the dawn in the Garden of Eden.”

Newspaper readers knew little about Hawaii at that time, and Twain became their guide, perhaps the first travel writer to come ashore, said Bob Hirst, chief curator and general editor of the Mark Twain Papers, a huge collection of the author’s writing kept at the University of California, Berkeley.

“When he got there it was just absolutely heaven to him,” Hirst said in a call from the Bay Area campus. “He did a thorough job of reporting on the islands. He interviewed and saw a lot of people.”

While in Hawaii, Twain also scored a true journalistic scoop.

Fifteen survivors of the clipper ship Hornet, which burned and sank off the coast of Central America, reached Hawaii in June after 43 days at sea in an open boat with scant food and water. Twain interviewed them at the Seaman’s Hospital on Oahu.

He had to be carried there on a stretcher because he was suffering from saddle sores he got while touring the Big Island on horseback.

“He comes to the hospital where these guys are trying to recover and gets the whole story of this remarkable shipwreck and survival,” Hirst said. “He writes it up overnight, and someone has to take it to a ship that is leaving, and it got tossed on board from someone on the dock. The Sacramento Union got the absolute scoop on this.”

Across the west the reception to Twain’s letters was so positive it surprised the author, who went on to become a public lecturer when he returned to the mainland, said Twain impersonator McAvoy Layne, who has performed as the author for 28 years.

“They loved it,” Layne said. “They ate it up.”

Twain’s letters from Hawaii are among his best writing, full of Hawaiiana and Americana, Layne said by phone from his home in Lake Tahoe, Nev. But Twain possessed more than a sense of humor.

“He had a humorous outlook on life,” said Layne, 72. “He had such insight into human nature, and he could just comment on it in a way that made you smile.”

To mark the anniversary of Twain’s time in Hawaii, Layne has teamed up with an old friend, Maui actress, radio announcer and storyteller Kathy Collins, for a series of performances that put the humorist face to face with a longtime Collins character named Tita. In “Twain Meets Tita,” Collins’ character tries to bring Twain into 21st century with sass and wit. They tried it out in February in the Lake Tahoe area.

“I wasn’t sure it would work together,” Layne said. “But her pidgin is so cool and so hip that I thought if it did work, it would be a nice chemistry.”

They had not rehearsed, so Layne just launched into his Twain persona.

“I had no idea where or when she was going to interrupt me, and it was fun,” Layne said. “It kept me on my toes.”

The pair will perform “Twain Meets Tita” from May 2 to 5 on four islands.

Layne worked in radio in Hawaii in the 1970s, on Kauai, Oahu and Maui, where he met then-17-year-old Collins during the morning show at KMVI AM. He was the host known as the Riddle King, and she did the news.

“Tita is a my pidgin-speaking alter ego,” the 58-year-old Collins said in a call from Maui. “A lot of sass and a lot of heart. She is basically a composite of the titas I grew up with. I’m a Maui girl.”

Twain never returned to Hawaii, which held him under its spell for the rest of his life. He got close in 1895 while sailing on the steamer Warrimoo but could not come ashore because of a cholera epidemic.

During a lecture in 1889, Twain put words to what he had felt for decades. In his “prose poem,” as it’s called, Twain said “no other land could so longingly and beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking through half a lifetime, as that one has done.” He spoke of “garlanded crags,” “plumy palms drowsing by the shore” and the fragrance of flowers he could smell decades after they had wilted.

Collins and Layne plan to close their celebration of Twain in Hawaii with that passage.

“I told McAvoy that I thought it was lovely and started committing it to memory,” Collins said. “Now it is my morning ritual. When I get in my car and start driving somewhere, I recite it and look around at what he so beautifully described.”

IN HIS WORDS

Excerpts from “Letters from Hawaii” by Mark Twain and edited by A. Grove Day

“I saw long-haired, saddle-colored Sandwich Island maidens sitting on the ground in the shade of corner houses, gazing indolently at whatever or whoever happened along.”

“I walked on a firm foundation of coral built up from the bottom of the sea by the absurd but preserving insect of that name, with a light layer of lava and cinders overlying the coral, belched up out of fathomless hell long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands dead and cold and harmless yonder in the distance.”

After spending time on Maui:

“I never spent so pleasant a month before, bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I doubt there is a mean person there, from the homeliest man on the island (Lewers) down to the oldest (Tallant). I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I had a jolly time.”

Bound for the Big Island aboard the schooner Boomerang after a rat scampered over him as he tried to sleep:

“Presently something galloped over me once more. I knew it was not a rat this time, and I thought it might be a centipede, because the captain had killed one on deck in the afternoon. The first glance at the pillow showed me a repulsive sentinel perched on the end of it — cockroaches at large as peach leaves — fellows with long quivering antennae and fiery malginent eyes.”

On the death of Capt. Cook:

“Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook’s assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. Whereever he went among the Islands, he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment.”

At night overlooking Kilauea Volcano:

“I turned to see the effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-face set of men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity. The place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on furlough.”