In October, I attended the Harvard Bookstore launch of Hester Kaplan’s memoir Twice Born: Finding my Father in the Margins of Biography. For anyone who is not familiar with the author, she is the daughter of Justin Kaplan who wrote Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. In Twice Born, Hester Kaplan takes us to Cambridge, where she grew up, as well as into the pages of her father’s acclaimed biography of Twain. There are no holds barred in her scrutiny of her father and his relationship with his inquisitive middle daughter. We follow her as a child as she sneaks into his study, a room that was off-limits, and cringe when she accidently knocks over a box of paperclips. We join her at the Kaplans’ kitchen table while Justin reads to the family after a meal. We get a whiff of the lilacs he loved, growing outside his office window, and experience Francis Avenue, “Professors’ Row,” in all seasons. I was utterly charmed by both the book with its erudite prose and the author’s chutzpah at searching for her father after his death through his nonfiction, not an easy task. She writes, “But as the biographer, my father had to hold knowledge and ignorance, past, present and future, flash back and flash forward at the same time, keep his mouth shut and allow the story to unfold. As do I to keep myself from telling my father that if he remained so hidden, his children would end up feeling they’d never known him, that he’d never known them, that this would bloom as unshakable sadness in their middle age. That I would end up writing this book about him, hoping to change the course of things.”
Considering that both parents enjoyed successful careers as authors, it is hardly a surprise that Hester Kaplan would have felt pressure to become a writer too. Her mother even gave her advice about how to approach an eventual career in writing. Hester remembers it thus: “If you want to write, observe everything, my mother, a novelist and nonfiction writer, had instructed me as a child.”
If you’re interested in the twentieth century literary world, Twice Born is for you. I enjoyed the memoir so much that I intend to listen to the audiobook as a follow-up, and then look for Hester Kaplan’s other books, which include two novels and a short story collection.
