President Laura Skandera Trombley featured in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

Rancho Cucamonga jumps to read Mark Twain

By David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Published 04/22/2010

APRIL HAS been a big month for admirers of Mark Twain, who include almost everyone in Rancho Cucamonga (oh, what fun Twain could have had with that name).

Its twin libraries are wrapping up activities involving "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," Rancho Cucamonga's everybody-read-this choice courtesy of a Big Read grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ah, "Tom Sawyer"! Who can't vividly recall from childhood the classic tale of a rambunctious, barefoot boy and his heartwarming quest for shoes? Crammed with unforgettable scenes: whitewashing the cave, going to a stranger's funeral and mocking the friendly town drunk, Indigenous Person Joe.

OK, maybe we need to read it again.

In another April milestone, Twain died 100 years ago this month: April 21, 1910.

"The day we've been waiting for for 100 years is upon us," scholar Laura Trombley joked last Saturday in an appearance at the Biane Library.

How did the Twain expert, Claremont resident and distinguished president of Pitzer College plan to spend Wednesday evening?

"I'll be in my backyard looking for Halley's comet with a cigar and a glass of whiskey," Trombley said. She added: "Not really."

Well, it was a nice image.

2010 is also important to Twainiacs because of two other round-number anniversaries: He published "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," one of the great American novels, 125 years ago (Feb. 18, 1885), and he was born 175 years ago (Nov. 30, 1835).

If you know anything about Mark Twain, and surely almost everyone in America knows at least one or two things about Mark Twain, you might know that he was born the same year Halley's comet appeared and also vowed to go out the year it returned, 75 years later.

And he succeeded, which seems to me far more complicated a feat than Babe Ruth pointing to a spot in the stands for a home run.

"His mother took it as an augury," Trombley told me after her library talk. "She was always telling the story of him being born the same year as the comet."

For Twain, who went from humble beginnings to worldwide fame, comparing himself to a comet was neat symbolism.

Although he probably didn't witness the comet's return, being busy dying at the time, it was in the skies when he expired.

Most of us probably also know that Twain's real name was Samuel Clemens, who took his pen name from a riverboat pilots' cry; that he wrote a tall tale about a jumping-frog contest and a great novel about a runaway slave and a white outcast who aids him; and that he wrote or uttered sardonic quips on almost every subject imaginable.

(Can't you imagine Twain on Twitter, making the most of 140 characters?)

Not only that, but most of us could identify a photo of him, or even describe him from memory: fluffy white hair, white mustache, white suit.

That's how Twain would want us to remember him, Trombley said. The man owned two dozen white suits, all hand-tailored, and loved to be photographed wearing them.

"He had a keen understanding of marketing and branding. He understood the power of image long before other people did," Trombley told me.

"The fact that we can still walk past a poster of him and recognize him speaks to that."

Twain wrote fiction, journalism and travel books, he lectured all over the world and he was a public intellectual, widely quoted.

It's hard to know how to describe him. Even "writer" is limiting. Trombley thinks of him as a mix of Richard Pryor, Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter Thompson.

Among the biggest celebrities of his time, he met almost everyone who was anyone. No solitary figure, he surrounded himself with people.

"He wrote the casebook for how to become famous," Trombley said. "It was like attention was his oxygen. He couldn't live without it."

Maybe he had a little Paris Hilton in him too.

Trombley has written three books on Twain, the latest being "Mark Twain's Other Woman," about his later years.

While I've read more Twain than the average person, I haven't read as much Twain as I want.

I made my way through "Tom Sawyer," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," "A Tramp Abroad" and "Life on the Mississippi" by my early 20s, then took the next 25 years off.

Now I'm back, reading "Roughing It," his 1872 travelogue of the American West. Not one I'd recommend for neophytes, especially since "Roughing It" is more than 500 pages (or 800 pages in my edition, with copious notes in the back), but it's a vivid portrait of stagecoach travel, prospecting, desperadoes, frontier life, San Francisco, even Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands.

You might linger in a bookstore, or check the book out from the library, just to read two bits.

In the very funny Chapter 53, a drunken man begins telling a story about his grandfather's ram and gets tangled up in his own digressions.

And in the astonishing Chapter 16, Twain picks apart the Book of Mormon. Did he find it dull?

"It is chloroform in print," Twain declares.

But back to the Big Read, which wraps up next Thursday at the Biane Library with the talk "Humor and Cynicism in Mark Twain" at 7 p.m. With a topic like that, the event could go on for months, but it's probably just an hour.

After "Tom Sawyer," Trombley said young readers might like "The Prince and the Pauper" and older readers could try "Huckleberry Finn," "Pudd'nhead Wilson" or "The Innocents Abroad," a travel book about Twain's 1867 journey to Europe and the Middle East.

"It's still fresh," Trombley told me, "with the American rube going around Paris attempting to speak French, and the French are looking at him with quizzical expressions. And he's wondering why the French can't speak their own language."

David "Pudd'nhead" Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday. E-mail david.allen@inlandnewspapers.com, call (909) 483-9339 or write 2041 E. Fourth St., Ontario 91764. Read his blog at www.dailybulletin.com/davidallenblog