Never the Twain shall meet
Calum Henderson finds a documentary about a famed US author is really about us
The quotable American writer Mark Twain has a few different claims to fame. Author of classic novels, inventor of the modern bra clasp, he was also quite possibly the first major visiting celebrity to have been asked: “What do you think of New Zealand?”
One hundred and twenty-four years later, we still want to know. “What did he think of us, what did we think of him and what else was happening in New Zealand at that time?” asks host Oscar Kightley at the start of Following Twain, the new TVNZ 1 series retracing the literary giant’s steps through our country.
Twain, or Samuel Langhorne Clemens, as it would have said on his passport, arrived in Bluff in 1895 as part of an international speaking tour, broke, touring the world only so he could pay off his debts. We did what we always do in the presence of a visiting celeb and completely lost our cool. His Invercargill audience greeted him with a spontaneous round of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, which was sort of the 19th century equivalent of painting a brightly coloured mural.
The series mostly only uses Twain’s visit as a hook, a starting point for more interesting topics. Last week’s first episode was weighted mostly towards the third part of Kightley’s question: What else was happening in New Zealand in 1895? Well, for one thing, we were really into public executions.
It was the year we hung our first and only woman, Minnie Dean, in Invercargill. Dean’s grim story is fairly well-known, but how many know about her executioner, the government hangman Tom Long? Southland historian Lloyd Esler described how he was paid £25 a killing, then, roughly converting that amount into today’s money, posed Kightley the big question: “Would you take $1000 to hang somebody?”
Tempting to say Twain might have visited Southland at its absolute peak. Another historian, Susan Irvine, spoke about how the region was a hub of innovation in the 1890s, the place where the egg beater was invented and David Strang’s “soluble coffee powder”, or instant coffee, was first patented.
But can we tie it back to Twain somehow? He probably liked coffee. “He would have had a cup of Strang’s?” Kightley asked hopefully. “He could well have tried their instant coffee,” replied Irvine.
“Wow.”
“I know.”
“That’s so cool.” Okay, some of the links in this episode were a bit tenuous. After the break, Kightley met an Invercargill resident who was alive at the time of Twain’s visit — it was Henry, the oldest tuatara at Southland Museum. But when history is being made this accessible and entertaining, with such an infectious spirit of curiosity, it’s hard to get mad about it.
The first episode used the novelty of Twain’s visit as the springboard for a dive into our local history and came up clutching plenty of weird and interesting treasures. What did Twain think of New Zealand? Like all visiting celebrities who’ve been asked that question over the years, it’s more about us than him.