Thomas Fuller, Mark Twain, & Monsieur Ambivalence

I first met Thomas Fuller when he was performing a one-man play of his own-making on the life of Mark Twain in San Luis Obispo. Tom was a better Twain than Hal Hollbrook, but not quite as good as Twain himself

I was married, two kids, a 9 to 5 job, "the full catastrophe" as Kazantzakis puts it in Zorba the Greek.

Tom was single, lived in his car or in cheap motels, traveling up and down California, doing his Mark Twain play in places like Weed and Paso Robles and Brawley, any town that would have him.

I couldn't figure out how he made a living, he couldn't figure out how I lived, and thus we were equals.

Through the years we stayed in touch while drifting apart. He moved around--Kansas, Chicago, San Francisco, Berkeley--always writing, playing his cornet, tuning pianos, hosting a comedy show on a community access station in the Bay Area. He made a movie, Kirk's Notes. It was very, very good but went nowhere as the humour in it was too profound.

I wouldn't see him for years, then the phone would ring or a postcard arrive.

I published a book of poems, The Frog Club (Readymade Press, 1999) and sent it to Tom, hoping it would find him at the last address I had. He wrote back, "I see you're doing the experimental thing in the French manner of Marcel Duchamp." I took it to mean he didn't like my book, but with Tom you could never be sure.

Years went by like this, a phone call, a postcard with colorful Sharpie doodles, "visitations from Tom", I called them. By this time I'd started a small press, IF SF, and moved to San Francisco.

I don't remember if he found me or I reached out to him, but one day a thick package arrived in the mailbox of IF SF with a Clermont-Ferrand postal stamp, festooned with the umistakable Sharpie doodlings.

Monsieur Ambivalence, a post literate fable by Thomas Fuller.

The last thing I thought Thomas Fuller would ever write is a book about France.

I read the ms. in two sittings. Tom pencilled an address in France, a cell phone number where he could be reached.

When I called, he said he'd been living in France on and off for two years. He'd met a woman, another American, a painter, and they'd found a village where the rent was cheap. Tom sublet his place in Berkeley and could come back to the States at a moment's notice, but the longer he stayed in France the more he liked it. "I think I'm actually French," he said.

I asked him if he wrote the book on his Olivetti portable typewriter, a manual machine he was so proud of and which he always carried with him wherever he was. He laughed, never answering my question.

After my second reading I decided to publish Monsieur Ambivalence, the first novel IF SF had ever undertaken, a pretty big project as far as I was concerned. I sent Tom a contract, which he never signed, though he did send me a Cuban cigar wrapped in a piece of white stationary from a hotel in Lyon and a note in his hand that he "looked forward to doing business with me."

I still haven't seen the mysterious Mr. Fuller in years. We did all our business--editing, design approvals etc. etc--by phone or email. He's coming to San Francisco this week for book party's and readings--Thursday and Friday, September 12 and 13.

I'm not sure what I'll see when I see him again but I know whatever I see will be lively, not what I'm expecting, full of surprises, and fun the way Mark Twain might have been fun if he had really been Mark Twain and not Sam Clemens.