The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

It purported to be a faithful reproduction of the original interiors, but there were wires and water sprinklers clumsily evident in every room. I also very much doubt that young Samuel Clemens’s bedroom had Armstrong vinyl on the floor (the same pattern as in my mother’s kitchen, I was interested to note) or that his sister’s bedroom had a plywood partition in it. You don’t actually go in the house; you look at it through the windows. At each window there is a recorded message telling you about that room as if you were a moron: ‘This is the kitchen. This is where Mrs Clemens would prepare thefamily’s meals . . .’. The whole thing is pretty shabby, which wouldn’t be so awful if it were owned by some underfunded local literary society and they were doing the best they could with it. In fact, it is owned by the city of Hannibal and it draws 135,000 visitors a year. It’s a little gold mine for the town.
    I proceeded from window to window behind a bald fat guy, whose abundant rolls of flesh made him look as if he were wearing an assortment of inner tubes beneath his shirt. ‘What do you think of it?’ I asked him. He fixed me with that instant friendliness Americans freely adopt with strangers. It is their most becoming trait. ‘Oh, I think it’s great. I come here whenever I’m in Hannibal – two, three times a year. Sometimes I go out of my way to come here.’
    ‘Really?’ I tried not to sound dumbfounded.
    ‘Yeah. I must have been here twenty, thirty times by now. This is a real shrine, you know.’
    ‘You think it’s well done?’
    ‘Oh, for sure.’
    ‘Would you say the house is just like Twain described it in his books?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ the man said thoughtfully, ‘I’ve never read one of his books.’
    Next door, attached to the house, was a small museum, which was better. There were cases of Twain memorabilia – first editions, one of his typewriters, photographs, some letters. There was precious little to link him to the house or the town. It is worth remembering that Twain got the hell out of both Hannibal and Missouri as soon as he could, and was always disinclined to come back. I went outside and looked around. Beside the house was a white fence with a sign saying TOM SAWYER’S FENCE. HERE STOOD THE BOARDFENCE WHICH TOM SAWYER PERSUADED HIS GANG TO PAY HIM FOR THE PLEASURE OF WHITE-WASHING. TOM SAT BY AND SAW THAT IT WAS WELL DONE . Really wakes up your interest in literature, doesn’t it? Next door to the Twain house and museum – and I mean absolutely right next to it – was the Mark Twain Drive-In Restaurant and Dinette, with cars parked in little bays and people grazing off trays attached to their windows. It really lent the scene a touch of class. I began to understand why Clemens didn’t just leave town but also changed his name.
    I strolled around the business district. The whole area was a dispiriting combination of auto parts stores, empty buildings and vacant lots. I had always thought that all river towns, even the poor ones, had something about them – a kind of faded elegance, a raffish air – that made them more interesting than other towns, that the river served as a conduit to the larger world and washed up a more interesting and sophisticated brand of detritus. But not Hannibal. It had obviously had better days, but even they couldn’t have been all that great. The Hotel Mark Twain was boarded up. That’s a sad sight – a tall building with every window plugged with plywood. Every business in town appeared to trade on Twain and his books – the Mark Twain Roofing Company, the Mark Twain Savings and Loan, the Tom ’n’ Huck Motel, the Injun Joe Campground and Go-Kart Track, the Huck Finn Shopping Center. You could even go and be insane at the Mark Twain Mental Health Center – a possibility that would, I imagine, grow increasingly likely with every day spent in Hannibal. The whole place was sad and awful. I had been planning to stay for lunch, but