Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2003

When the Giants of Literature Came to Hawai'i
By Les Peetz

Twain, London and Stevenson were among the literati seduced and inspired by the Islands.

In Hawai'i, there is a tradition known as "talking story," which means just about any casual conversation, from small talk to parables, and it transcends race, gender and time. The ancient Hawaiians had an oral tradition, a folklore that, in its own way, was as rich as Greek mythology. The missionaries who took over their lands and their lives had stories as well-most of them Biblical-which were, whatever their flaws, quite literate. The missionaries were followed by a stream of visitors to the Islands who also talked story about Hawai'i, often in print.

Western writers, both major and marginal, have visited Hawai'i for nearly two centuries, each of them able to capture only a little of the magic, myth and awe they experienced. Some left with narrow stereotypes and little else. John P. Marquand, a Boston Brahmin who wrote The Late George Apley, came to Honolulu during the '30s and '40s and wrote one or two fine stories. However, his renown comes from a fictional Japanese-American detective, Mr. Moto. The Chinese detective Charlie Chan, widely lampooned, was the creation of Earl Derr Biggers, a newspaperman who lived in Hawai'i for a couple of years. Chan was based upon a real Honolulu detective named Chang Apana. Neither Marquand nor Biggers had the inclination to capture Honolulu and O'ahu in all of their complexity, charm and contradictions. Neither, for that matter, did Herman Melville, author of the American classic Moby Dick and certainly one of the giants of literature.

Writers are malcontents, none more so than Melville, whose brief and incidental stay in Hawai'i was an unhappy one. In 1843, he jumped ship during a whaling expedition in the Marquesas, was caught and charged with mutiny, escaped and made his way first to Lahaina and then to Honolulu. For a month or so he made a living setting pins in a Honolulu bowling alley, then caught the first ship he could for the Mainland. He apparently left some dark, bitter and unpublished remarks about missionaries and civilization and never returned.

On the other hand, Mark Twain, who could be just as dark and bilious as Melville at times, albeit a far better companion, launched his career as a serious writer in Hawai'i, and never forgot it. At the time-it was 1866-he was a correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, and even in California he had been unlucky. At one point, economic despair nearly drove him to suicide. Once, in retribution for an article concerning police brutality, he was imprisoned briefly in San Francisco.

Twain would be reborn in Hawai'i. His four-month stay, as short as Melville's, was active and well-recorded. He missed nothing. He would witness stragglers from a shipwreck find safety in Honolulu Harbor. He would see an unstable monarchy, social unrest and widespread corruption on all levels of a new society. He would tour the volcano (by comparison, he would later reflect, Vesuvius was a mere soup kettle) and write about saddle sores after a trip around Diamond Head on a horse named O'ahu. He had no illusions about what he would call "the damned human race," here or anywhere else. And yet he would remember Hawai'i as "the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean."

He wrote the phrase without irony or equivocation, rare enough for Twain. Twenty years after his visit, he would begin and discard a novel about Hawai'i, a place he called the Isles of the Blest. While sketching the novel, he referred to the "peacefullest, restfullest, balmiest, dreamiest haven of refuge for a worn and weary spirit the surface of the world can offer."

His stories were published in Sacramento, and Twain returned to California a changed man, a man of letters rather than a wisecracking journalist. He began a series of lectures about Hawai'i, which became wildly popular and established him as a national figure for the first time. Neither he nor American literature would ever be the same again. It has even been argued that his abandoned Hawai'i novel became the model for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a cautionary tale about the machine age taking over an old world and destroying it.

Writers who come to Hawai'i bring their personalities with them. Both in circumstance and temperament, Melville and Twain were a world apart. Melville was an apocalyptic man, his outlook and humor, even on a good day, close to that of the Old Testament-dark and fatalistic. Twain was mercurial and worldly, always shrewd, sometimes practical. His observations were sharp and keen.

Authors who thrive more on dreams-idealists and philosophers-often find themselves in the Pacific, but are more apt to find peace of mind farther south, where the inevitable friction between civilization and nature is less pronounced. Hawai'i, it should be remembered, is in the North Pacific and has, since the 1820s, been Westernized to some degree or other, for better and for worse. If one wished to summarize the history of these Islands-especially that of O'ahu-one might picture a pitched argument among the Hawaiian god Lono, colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards and Ben Franklin. Since the annexation of the Islands in 1893 by the United States and the waning of the missionaries, it appears that the practical and canny Franklin may have gotten the upper hand, for the time being.

For writers, even the most civilized among them, do not hesitate to pick arguments, even with Lono, Edwards and Franklin, or to begin different quarrels with each other or themselves. In the process, they are transformed, often against their will and sometimes without knowing it. This happened to Twain. It also happened to Robert Louis Stevenson, who was renowned but in ill health when he came here in the late 1880s. "Fiction," Stevenson once said, "is to adults what play is to the child."

Stevenson played harder than most. He attributed his fame to his Scottish work ethic, downplaying his enormous talent. This modesty doubtless helped him befriend King David Kalakaua and Princess Ka'iulani. The friendship between them nearly kept him forever in Hawai'i, but when Ka'iulani left for a tour of Europe, Stevenson sailed for Samoa, where his short life ended.

He had written scores of tales and stories. Treasure Island and Kidnapped, written for children, had made him famous and wealthy. With Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he had anticipated Freud, and he had always had a fascination with the supernatural, something he shared with Hawaiian storytellers. Two of his finest short works, The Isle of Voices and The Bottle Imp, originated in Hawai'i and displayed his keen grasp of superstition, mystery and hope.

It happened to Jack London, as well. Already the wealthiest writer in the world at the time, he arrived in Hawai'i on a yacht that he had financed and helped to build. The very fact that the Snark arrived here at all was a miracle. The craft was defective in every way imaginable, and everything leaked, but make it he did, settling down for a while near what is now the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. When he was in harness, London wrote a thousand words a day, no more and no less, and his output was therefore staggering for a man who, like Stevenson, would die young.

His personality was equally staggering. He was ill-educated but well-read. He was a man who embodied the strenuous life, and he was fascinated by supermen. He was also a socialist. Earlier in his career, he had brayed about the white man's burden in a way that would have embarrassed Rudyard Kipling. But he would, while in Hawai'i, write sympathetically and with admiration about Native Hawaiians and the newly arrived Chinese. He had large appetites and was physically active-he used his wealth and fame to help revive surfing as a sport-but he dug deeply and unevenly into psychology and mysticism. It is no accident that some of his most satisfying stories originate in Hawai'i, and that a local publisher has presented them all in one volume. There is this passage from The Water Baby, in which a Hawaiian elder, a kupuna, sums up his philosophy:

This I know: as I grow old I seek less for the truth from without me, and find more of the truth within me … Man, if he be not blind, recognizes truth when he sees it. Is this thought that I have thought a dream?

A dream. For there is something in these Islands that encourages dreaming. The most hardheaded realists relax just a bit. And the dream lingers for years, a haven for the troubled. Here is Mark Twain again, older by 23 years and 23 times as bitter, in 1889:

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and
waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done.

For more down-to-earth writers-even Twain was more of a dreamer than he cared to admit-one of the most remarkable things about Hawai'i was its diversity. That most cynical of writers, Somerset Maugham, came through Honolulu in 1916, working for British intelligence, and five years later wrote a story about a sea captain, a native girl and black magic. About Honolulu, he had this to say:

It is the meeting place of East and West. The very new rubs shoulders with the immeasurably old. And if you have not found the romance you expected you have come across something singularly intriguing. All these strange people live close to each other, with different languages and different thoughts; they believe in different gods and they have different values … And somehow as you watch them, you have an impression of extraordinary vitality.

Vitality and an encyclopedic history. If James Joyce had been practical and organized, he would have been James Michener. Michener's knowledge of Hawai'i was unbelievably thorough and boundless, like his book (although it has many critics). Unlike the other writers, he lived here for years, long enough to establish himself in the literary circle of A. Grove Day, for decades the dean of all literature from and about Hawai'i, and to involve himself in the gritty politics of statehood and at least one gubernatorial race.

Michener was a painstaking craftsman, who had worked as a nuts-and-bolts editor, as well as a novelist. Hawai'i tells the story of everything that happened here from the beginning of time until 1959. Through all of the detail, plotting, intrigue and moralizing of the book, Michener's enchantment is still evident. At the very beginning of the book, he is rhapsodic:

These beautiful islands, waiting in the sun and storm, how much they seemed like beautiful women waiting for their men to come home at dusk, waiting with open arms and warm bodies and consolation … Therefore, men of Polynesia and Boston and China and Mount Fuji and the barrios of the Philippines, do not come to these islands empty handed, or craven in spirit … Bring your own food, your own gods, your own flowers and fruits and concepts.

Over a thousand pages later, the narrator, a man named Hoxworth Hale, discovers

… that I, too, am one of those Golden Men who see both the West and the East, who cherish the glowing past and who apprehend the obscure future; and the things I have written of in this memoir are very close to my heart.

Joan Didion has made a career of apprehending the obscure present. She is a terse, poetic and dark writer, one of the first and best of the literary journalists, and is, by her own admission, often surly and ill-at-ease in the world. She first wrote from Hawai'i on a visit to Honolulu in 1966, during the Vietnam War and a concurrent economic boom, and saw an island that for her had a "feverish luster" and a mood that she called "inescapably, one of war." Pearl Harbor made her cry, and the fading Hawaiian aristocracy-the sons and daughters of missionaries and the old Big Five-made her edgy. She concluded of these wealthy and gracious people:

I think that they would not understand why I came to Hawai'i, and I think that they will perhaps not understand what I am going to remember.

In 1977, eleven years and several visits later, she is still fascinated by war and is saddened by the death of James Jones, who wrote From Here to Eternity. She visits Schofield Barracks, where much of the novel takes place, where, she observes, "crushed white coral gives way to red dirt," and hopes against hope that someone played taps for him. But even in her most somber mood-she is often painfully confessional-she finds some relief in just being here:

We spend, my husband and I and the baby, a restorative week in paradise. We are the other's model of consideration, tact, restraint at the very edge of the precipice.

The young Mark Twain had remarked, "I had rather smell Honolulu at sunset than the old police court in San Francisco"-and it is likely that even Melville and Didion would have agreed. The older Twain, the one who bragged about writing with a "pen warmed up in hell," reserved some of his most lyrical prose for Hawai'i:

I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished 20 years ago.

Twain's O'ahu and ours are separated by a century-and-a-half of what we call progress. But it remains a small island, roughly 60 miles long and 45 miles wide, with one of the world's major cities at one end, smaller ones on the windward and leeward sides, a surfer's paradise on the North Shore and a rich, colorful and often unpredictable culture throughout. People arriving for the first time are often struck most by the vividness of color. The sea is bluer, the sky clearer, the plants greener; even the concrete seems friendlier. This may explain part of the spell that O'ahu casts on writers. The rest cannot be explained fully; even the most jaded writer will find a mother lode of material in lieu of a vacation without knowing why.

O'ahu is a compact center for the past and present, for all races, most livelihoods, the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the gaudy and the serene. In classic literature, earth, air, fire and water were deemed essential to great art. Perhaps this is true of O'ahu and all of the other islands we call home.

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