Tag Archives: Hal Holbrook

Hal Holbrook meets the Twain again

By Bob Hicks

Hal Holbrook‘s back in town on Saturday, riding the horse of his magnificent one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, and even as Holbrook noses up on 87 years old it’s bound to be a helluva show.

Mark Twain receiving an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. Wikimedia CommonsA couple of weeks ago I chatted on the phone for about an hour with him (Holbrook, not Twain, although it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart), and today two resulting stories have seen the light of print.

This one – As Twain, Holbrook’s made his mark – is in Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, and is partly about Holbrook’s deepening attachment to Twain’s more politically acerbic side.

This one – Hal Holbrook on jackasses and Mark Twain’s wound – is on the online culture journal Oregon Arts Watch and ranges a little more broadly, dropping in on John Updike and Lewis Leary and the enduring controversies over The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Holbrook’s been at this game in one form or another since the late 1940s, and he’s really quite amazing at it. Just for fun I looked up a review of Mark Twain Tonight! that I wrote for The Oregonian in 1991. Here are excerpts:

Where does Hal Holbrook leave off and Mark Twain begin? After 36 years of Holbrook’s solo show Mark Twain Tonight! it gets harder and harder to tell. But one thing’s sure: No humorist alive who’s working in the American language is more deeply and dryly funny.

On Friday night, 2,700 people packed Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall as tight as a sardine can. Holbrook (or was it Twain?) provided the salt.

Holbrook’s one-night stand was accompanied by the usual appurtenances: a lectern, a library table, a padded armchair, a pitcher of water, a clutter of books. He strode blithely through the usual fog of cigar smoke, wearing the usual Kentucky-colonel creamy white suit. And as usual, he lit a firecracker string of laughter under his audience.

“Civiliiizzay-shun,” Holbrook exclaims at one point, turning the word into an impossible contortion that is part wonderment, part delight and part sneer.

It was part of Twain’s genius as an entertainer that he could make the most cynically corrosive observations about human nature and phrase them in such a way that his readers and listeners would both recognize and delight in them. To a young country both innocent and destructive, prudish and bursting with desire, he became an avuncular and smilingly savage bearer of self-knowledge.

Sin and salvation — the twin excesses of America — are the twin pillars of Twain’s comedy.

“When I was a young man wavering between the pulpit and the penitentiary …” he might begin. Or again: “That old Presbyterian religion laid on me like an anvil sometimes …”

Holbrook … played Twain’s favorite themes lightly. Stiff-shouldered and shuffle-stepped, with that roiling rasp that is a cadenced, musically scraping sound, he reminisced about young Sam Clemens’ wandering days in Nevada and California and the Sandwich Islands.

His apparent rambling – always with a point somewhere around the bend and always delivered with devastating timing – covered the life-saving pleasures of habits (bad ones), the fate of young missionaries who are et by apologetic cannibals, the reason that Irishmen don’t fall on dogs and the impossibilities of the political beast.

“Teddy Roosevelt, the great hunter,” he says. Pause. “and conservationist.”

“Shot a bear!” Holbrook shakes his head in bafflement. “When he could have stayed home and shot a senator!”

*

Photo: Mark Twain receiving an honorary doctorate degree from Oxford University. Wikimedia Commons

From our stove to yours: small bites

By Bob Hicks

What’s been cooking lately in the Scatter kitchen? Well, a lovely baked dressing made up mostly of mushrooms, celery, onions and leftover bread slices (Mrs. Scatter’s clean-out-the-fridge creation). And another batch of baklazhannia ikra, or “poor man’s caviar,” an addictive eggplant/tomato/onion/pepper relish that William Grimes discovered recently in one of those great old Time/Life Foods of the World cookbooks and kindly passed along as a recipe in the New York Times.

Photo by Keith Weller/Wikimedia CommonsThings have been cooking outside of World Headquarters, too. I’ve recently signed on as a regular contributor to Oregon Arts Watch, the ambitious online cultural newsmagazine masterminded and edited by my friend and former colleague at The Oregonian, Barry Johnson. I’ve filed a couple of pieces there already:

A few other things that’ve been keeping me hopping, each of which should be coming out in story form sometime soon:

    • An evening up a dark alley to The Publication Studio for the opening celebration for artist Melody Owen‘s new book, which has something to do with mad hatters and rabbit holes.
    • An afternoon at the Portland Opera studios, where I discovered general manager Christopher Mattaliano leaping up and down with a cutout version of a gingerbread witch as singers from Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel watched and nodded.
    • A morning at Milagro Theatre, talking with Dañel Malàn about the perils and pleasures of touring the country to perform bilingual plays in tucked-away spaces – and whether the world is really going to end with the Mayan calendar in 2012.

Hal Holbrook in 2007. Photo: Luke Ford, lukeford.net/Wikimedia Commons

  • An hour’s conversation on the phone with Hal Holbrook, octogenarian actor and uncanny channeler of the late, great Mark Twain, on topics ranging from politics to history to the unhappy state of print journalism and what it means to the future of democracy: “It’s a good paper. But as I remind people, it’s called the Wall. Street. Journal. Not The Journal. And it’s owned by that guy, Murdoch, who’s in all that trouble in England.”

Lots cooking, and more coming up. Last night I had an odd dream: I’d accepted an assignment from a glossy magazine to do a spread comparing two versions of barbecued pulled pork from famous Southern restaurants. This was a touchy situation for an ordinarily vegetarian/pescetarian writer, who was sorely tempted to do some serious taste-testing. In my dream I solved the problem by contacting the chefs of each restaurant and asking them to send me a towel soaked in their secret sauces. I then breathed in the aromas deeply, and began to type. If you should happen to stumble across this story somewhere in print, don’t believe a word it says.

*

ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

  • Photo by Keith Weller/Wikimedia Commons
  • Hal Holbrook in 2007. Photo: Luke Ford, lukeford.net/Wikimedia Commons