By Stuart Mitchner

Infinite riches in a little room….

My epigraph for the shortest month comes from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta. Although A Book of Days for the Literary Year has Marlowe born on February 6, 1564, Wikipedia goes with the date of his February 26 baptism, two months before William Shakespeare’s on April 26.

The close proximity of baptism dates sent me back to Calvin Hoffman’s The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare, which sets out to prove that Marlowe’s death in a May 1593 tavern brawl was staged and that he spent the rest of his life in exile, publishing his plays and poems under the name of William Shakespeare. Although Hoffman’s argument failed to convince me, the image of Kit Marlowe as a dagger-wielding mystery man gave me the idea for a novel in which he and a star-studded cast of luminaries from Keats to Coleridge to Orson Welles journey east to build a fabulous city of art.

The novel, which engaged me for a few wild months in the mid-1970s, ultimately surfaced in a pair of poems appearing in the January 1994 and August 1995 issues of Poetry as “Verisimilitude” (“a large foreign city with no native population, where Blake preaches in the chapel of the sea, the walls turn to sunrise at DaVinci’s pizzeria, the boatman recites Keats for the price of a meal, and on Sundays down by the river, a one-man band called Shakespeare plays the andante from Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante”) and “The Bijou Hotel” (“Suddenly there they all are — Pluto, Mickey, Kilroy, Charlie Chan, Gabby Hayes, the Shadow, the whole crowd of drifters, Gunga Dins, pith-helmeted troopers, seersucker-suited traders and conspirators”). If I could get away with it, I’d drop the first three to make room for my favorite film-noir character, the forever haunted Elisha Cook Jr., from The Maltese Falcon, The Phantom Lady, and The Big Sleep.

Snow

Speaking of poetry, the real thing made a brief appearance Monday, transforming our backyard, every branch of every tree lined with fresh snow that was gone by late morning. Nothing like nature to put things in perspective, such as the actual template for an imaginary metropolis of art as vast as the internet, with room for everyone and everything, infinite riches meaning not only the Joyces and Lincolns and Poes born in the shortest month, but those that died within the bounds of a month that begins with the death of Mary Shelley (February 1, 1851), ends with the death of Henry James (February 28, 1916), with at its heart the death of John Keats in Rome (February 23, 1821). At the ultimate Grand Bijou Hotel, which for me is here, in this column, there’s even room for the Illustrious Dead of February 18: Kubla Khan (1294), Fra Angelico (1455), Michaelangelo (1564), and Frank James, who showed a special interest in Shakespeare as a boy and died in 1915, a year before Henry, no relation unless some ambitious fabulist transports the author of The Ambassadors to the 1880s in time for the Northfield, Minnesota Raid.

Edison and Twain

Amazing, that it took until Valentine’s Day for me to realize that my long-ago dream has been right here in the pieces I’ve been writing for 20 years, take today for instance. On February 18, in a well-lit room at the Bijou Hotel, Mark Twain’s leaning over a pool table, chatting with his old friend Thomas Edison, who extended his stay from last week. Of course the Wizard of Menlo Park is a permanent resident of the hotel, keeping its infinite riches alight for the ages, as the Bee Gees suggest in the touching tribute from their album Odessa (released in February 1969): “He made electric lights to read, he gave us light today, Edison came to stay.” Subsequent verses (“All of the world can taste his glory”) end with “Edison’s here to stay.” And so he is.

Why Twain?

Readers aware that Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in November 1835 and died in April 1910 may well ask what he’s got to do with February. Not that he isn’t always welcome at the Bijou, as he once was at New York’s real-life Hotel Belleclaire on the Upper West Side. A decade ago my wife and I spent a few nights in the Belleclaire’s Mark Twain Suite, which featured a big, nicely framed photograph of the white-maned, white-suited author looking out a window with his pipe in his hand. The suite also included framed sketches of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and facsimile first editions of both novels. In fact, Twain’s stake in the shortest month is that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published on February 18, 1885.

Edison Filming

While the photograph of Twain in our hotel room was a polished, state of the art enlargement, Thomas Edison’s film was shot in person at the author’s Connecticut estate Stormfield, in 1909, a year before he died. That’s not some Photoshopped fantasy of Twain, it’s the living white-suited man himself walking around the grounds, puffing his pipe, his life breath in the smoke above his head. This is no seance, it’s a slice of reality, and to top it off, Edison filmed Twain having tea with his daughters Clare and Jean, stirring and sipping, alive in the moment.

With death only a year away, Twain was already gazing in that direction when he said “I came in 1835 with Halley’s Comet … and I expect to go out with it. It’ll be the great disappointment of my life if I don’t. The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now here are two indefinable freaks. They came in together. They must go out together.’ Oh, I am looking forward to that.” When Twain died on April 21, 1910, Halley’s Comet was again visible in the night sky, as it had been the day he was born.

Love’s Holiday

One permanent resident of the Bijou Hotel, along with Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, is Dr. Watson aka Nigel Bruce, who was born on February 14, 1895, in Ensenada, Mexico. That he died on October 8, 1953, is worth noting because, like Edison, he arrived in February and departed in October. Our Princeton landlord, the ambassador/historian George F. Kennan, born February 16, 1904, was amused when I told him I’d been conceived on Valentine’s Day and born on the cusp of Halloween. How do I know? My mother told me so during a discussion of the “birds and bees” that took place while she was reading Tom Sawyer out loud to me. For years my favorite pre-adolescent literary romance was Tom and Becky Thatcher, holding hands in the cave.

Mickey and Maggie

A legal stenographer before she worked in publishing, my mother would be pleased that my wife and I are faithful watchers of the Netflix series The Lincoln Lawyer. She’d especially enjoy the courtroom dynamics surrounding an embattled Mexican American defense attorney (Manuel García-Rulfo, born February 25, 1981) fighting the battle of his life with a snarky female prosecutor (Constance Zeimmer, brilliant as “Death-Row” Dana Berg). If my mother had been watching the Season 4 Valentine’s Day finale with us, wherein Mickey Haller’s ex-wife Maggie (Neve Campbell) comes to his rescue, she’d have shared my appreciation of the moving love story at the heart of the action, all too easy to overlook because the situation itself is so compelling — it’s life in prison and/or professional ruin for Mickey, who has been elaborately framed. Like the dread Dana, Maggie is a prosecutor, but when she sees her ex, the father of their teenage daughter, flailing, she rises magnificently to the occasion of his defense while giving him tough love outside the courtroom once she sees how close he is to cracking under the pressure.

The Real Murderer

In his introduction to The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare, Calvin Hoffman makes sure to emphasize “that it was not by first denying Shakespeare that my theory came into being. It was the growing conviction that no one but Christopher Marlowe could have written the works of Shakespeare.” It’s not just that Hoffman denies Shakespeare to make his point, he also, in effect, “murders” the actor and playwright who was baptized two months to the day after Marlowe.

If anyone “murdered” Shakespeare, however, it was Mark Twain, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when the Duke delivers Hamlet’s soliloquy: “So he went to marching up and down, thinking, and frowning horrible every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next he would sigh, and next he’d let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him…. This is the speech — I learned it, easy enough, while he was learning it to the king.”

Here’s Twain’s version, amended and condensed: “To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin that makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the innocent sleep, Great nature’s second course, And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of. There’s the respect must give us pause…” Twain’s version ends, “But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws. But get thee to a nunnery — go!”

During a conversation at the Bijou Hotel about the unraveling of Ophelia, I was reminded that the song she sings to Gertrude and Claudius begins with a reference to Saint Valentine’s Day.