Charles Gibson Remembers Mark Twain

Travelling with members of the Boston Authors Club, including club president and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” author Julia Ward Howe, Charlie Gibson, Jr. attended the dedication ceremony of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich Memorial Museum (author Aldrich’s childhood home) in 1908. Held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the event featured many distinguished speakers, including Mark Twain, who had been Aldrich’s close friend.

Nearly forty years later, Charlie wrote a short article on Twain’s tribute to Aldrich that day, which was published in late 1945 in the Mark Twain Quarterly, the official publication of the International Mark Twain Society. Entitled, “My Last Impression of Mark Twain,” Charlie wrote that Twain would “always remain the picture indelibly imprinted upon my mind, as he appeared on the stage” at the Aldrich Memorial. For Charlie, Mark Twain’s performance stood out as an example of the author’s great genius and extraordinary abilities.

Twain, “who wound up the occasion with a literary and dramatic flourish, that woke the audience, [who had] wilted into somnolence,” according to Charlie, spoke without notes and in an off-the-cuff manner. This was a radical departure from the approach of those who had taken the stage before him and had read directly from their notes.

According to his autobiography, Mark Twain had grown frustrated with the other speakers’ decision to read from manuscripts, a practice that annoyed him tremendously. The whole affair had reached the point of becoming “ludicrous,” in his opinion: “In my lifetime I have not listened to so much manuscript-reading before upon any occasion. . . . [N]o poet who isn’t one of the first class knows how to read, and so he is an affliction to everybody but himself when he tries it.”

For that reason, Twain abandoned his memorized remarks and decided to speak about Aldrich extemporaneously: “I abolished my prepared and vaguely ineffectually memorized solemnities and finished the day’s performance with twelve minutes of lawless and unconfined and desecrating nonsense.”

But what Twain described as “nonsense,” Charlie remembered as exquisite and powerful poetry:  “He was the outstanding figure of the occasion. His was the star performance. He was the protagonist who projected the soul of Aldrich once more into our midst.”

Unfortunately, neither Charlie nor Mark Twain provided any specifics regarding what Twain actually said. Instead, Charlie wrote the following:

But what was he saying to this exhausted audience, to make it come to life and lay down its palm leaf fans? I listened almost aghast. He seemed to be shattering the conventional precedent of the eulogy. His tribute was built up by circumlocution. He launched into a sea, that seemed at first almost irreverent; his arms waved in those long, familiar gestures, that reminded one at times of the side paddles of a Mississippi steamboat. We found ourselves catching our breath.

            The whole method of approach, the plan of attack, to the subject in hand, was so different from what had gone before, that it was difficult to realize we were actually in the same place and surrounding. Was this a literary circus we were attending, and he the showman in the center ring, shouting to the galleries? But the galleries responded. He drew a smile and laughter; his humor was irresistible, and the Housier[sic] style of his language gradually became a natural part of the atmosphere he created.

Charlie was so moved by Twain’s eulogy that he noted it was as if Twain’s soul had touched his own. He wrote, “It showed that mysterious power, that nature gives to genius, to project its mystic meaning to mankind with dramatic effect. . . . That great quality of imagination, perhaps the greatest endowment of the poet, as well as of the master of creative prose, was his, and he used it to his advantage.”

And that is what stood out in Charlie’s mind, years afterward: those twelve minutes of unscripted and honest “nonsense” one friend used to commemorate another that, at least in Charlie’s view, did more to honor the late author’s memory than the other eulogies given that day.

Charlie concluded his article, “The picture is there today as I write, indelibly engraved upon the memory, the ineradicable impression of a great mind, a great artist, possessed of great human sympathies.”

By Timothy Spezia, museum docent 

Image source:  http://www.biography.com/people/mark-twain-9512564

Sources:

Sources: 

“Aldrich House,” Strawberry Banke Museum, accessed August 18, 2015, http://strawberybanke.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=94:aldrich-house&catid=20:historic-buildings&Itemid=146.

Charles Hammond Gibson, “My Last Impression of Mark Twain,” Mark Twain Quarterly 7, no. 2(1945): 5–6.

Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (California: University of California Press, 2015), 251, accessed August 18, 2015, through Google Books.