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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, didn\u2019t make it easy for his future biographers. Not that he tried to be especially difficult\u2014so far as we know. But the man had thoughts, some profound, many irreverent, not a few misguided, on virtually every subject under the sun. Though his major books total only about fifteen volumes, Twain\u2019s speeches, editorials, lectures, short stories, letters, and aphorisms seem endless. Add in his journalistic efforts and you\u2019ve got an extraordinary body of work, not all of which has survived intact.<\/p>\n
And this is before you get into his dizzying experiences as a (mostly failed) businessman and investor, his complicated family life, his legion of friends and acquaintances, and the extraordinarily varied circles in which he lived and moved for more than 74 eventful years. No wonder his life is Ground Zero for the ambitious biographer.<\/p>\n
Now the Twain bug has bitten Ron Chernow, who is no stranger to the giants of American mythology. His bibliography includes books on the house of Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Alexander Hamilton inspired one of this century\u2019s greatest musicals and Chernow\u2019s life of George Washington netted the author a Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n
Even so, there\u2019s a sense, as one wades through Mark Twain, a magnificent doorstopper of an opus, that Chernow\u2019s met his literary match. Not because of a lack of information\u2014the tome\u2019s packed with facts, sometimes shovels-full by the page\u2014or because of subpar writing.<\/p>\n
Rather,\u00a0Mark Twain\u2019s biggest issue is its assumption that one of the most combustible personalities in American history can be constrained (\u201csivilized,\u201d if you will) to fit within the confines of a traditional, blow-by-blow narrative. He can\u2019t. And, as a result, Chernow\u2019s form and content occasionally are at loggerheads. Working through this tension, especially over the book\u2019s first half, can become unrelenting. On occasion, readers may feel as if they are wading across the Mississippi at flood tide.<\/p>\n
That said, the larger undertaking, though it involves some curious elisions and concisions\u2014Twain\u2019s Mississippi River piloting days, for instance, get unexpectedly short shrift\u2014is hardly a misfire. At its best, his writing, which draws extensively on letters and diaries, ensures that Twain emerges as much as a live wire as ever: brash, outspoken, and overflowing with exasperating contradictions.<\/p>\n
Take the subject of race. On the one hand, Twain was far more enlightened on the topic than many white Americans of his day and more than a few of ours. Born into a slave-holding family, he came to see the evils of the \u201cpeculiar institution\u201d early on and passed his remaining decades becoming an increasingly outspoken advocate for racial and cultural tolerance as well as an opponent of imperialism.<\/p>\n
Yet the road he travelled was hardly straight or level. Jingoism and anti-Catholic (and -Arab) bias pepper\u00a0The Innocents Abroad, Native Americans and Mormons are freely denigrated in\u00a0Roughing It, and Jim shows up as a minstrel show-worthy caricature in\u00a0Tom Sawyer Abroad.\u00a0Twain\u2019s fawning over Queen Victoria\u2019s appearance at her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 was worthy of the most Anglophilic propagandist.<\/p>\n
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1870 edition of Mark Twain\u2019s The Innocents Abroad<\/p>\n
Even as his thinking on race and empire grew in scope with age\u2014Twain was justly proud of the uproar he caused in late-1890s Vienna by taking public stands against anti-Semitism and his indifference towards Native peoples softened over his last years\u2014he was sometimes willing to pull his punches, most frustratingly on the subject of lynching.<\/p>\n
Privately an outspoken opponent of the practice, Twain publicly kept his powder dry as racial violence flared across the United States around the turn of the 20th century. His explosive essay on the topic, \u201cThe United States of Lyncherdom,\u201d didn\u2019t appear in print until 1923, and then in bowdlerized form. The writer\u2019s reluctance to air these \u201cunvarnished views,\u201d Chernow notes, was a major missed opportunity.<\/p>\n
Twain was no less vocal in his contrarian takes on organized religion, though, again, the most vitriolic of those pieces were only published decades after his death. Twain\u2019s skepticism stemmed, initially at least, from his mischievous nature, though, in time, bitter personal and professional blows cemented a nihilistic worldview. (That his wife, Livy, was a devout Christian and his closest friend, Joseph Twitchell, a Presbyterian minister, are two of the delightful ironies of Twain\u2019s life story.)<\/p>\n
The sheer breadth of his writing on the subject is enormous, running the gamut from the riotous skewering of the pious\u00a0boobus Americanus\u00a0in\u00a0The Innocents Abroad\u00a0to the cold, bitter logic of the posthumous\u00a0Letters from the Earth. In between one finds wit, nuance, and pathos (The Diaries of Adam and Eve) as well as a deep and cynical understanding of how ritual and public religious practice often work in tandem (The War Prayer).<\/p>\n
Much of Twain\u2019s anti-religious fervor also derived from his witnessing injustice and unmitigated suffering\u2014sometimes perpetrated in the name of God\u2014both within his family and during his extensive travels. Those things roused in him a kind of righteous ire.<\/p>\n
Yet, as Chernow thoroughly demonstrates, this wasn\u2019t always a positive force: the man had a volcanic temper and a seemingly limitless capacity for revenge. Virtually everyone who crossed him\u2014or didn\u2019t but Twain imagined had\u2014felt his wrath. He fell out with doctors, lawyers, publishers, business associates, landlords, relatives, and more. Even the deaths of some of those (like his former publishing partner Charles Webster) didn\u2019t calm his spirits.<\/p>\n
The one person who could always assuage the worst angels of Twain\u2019s nature was his wife, Livy. Their devotion to one another across courtship and 34 years of marriage forms a touching counterpoint to the upheaval that defined much of the rest of Twain\u2019s life. Though she had more cause than most to castigate him for his failings, especially economic mismanagement\u2014he squandered his substantial earnings and much of her considerable inheritance in a series of reckless investment schemes in the 1880s\u2014she never did. (Livy wasn\u2019t exactly a model of fiscal restraint, either; she and Twain seemed congenitally incapable of holding back when it came to procuring material items, especially for their sprawling Hartford mansion.)<\/p>\n
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William Dean Howells and Mark Twain in Redding, Connecticut. October 1908. Photo: NYPublic Library<\/p>\n
Their family life was, for a while, idyllic, with the couple\u2019s three daughters\u2014Susy, Clara, and Jean\u2014passing sheltered, uneventful childhoods in Hartford. But, as the bottom fell out of the family\u2019s finances, the whirlwind consumed the Clemens women. First, Livy was diagnosed with heart disease. Then, Susy, who was attending Bryn Mawr, developed a strong romantic attachment to a fellow female student. How much Twain and his wife knew about this attraction remains in dispute, but Susy was quickly whisked off to Europe with the rest of the brood, where the cost of living was cheaper.<\/p>\n
Still residing abroad in 1895, Twain filed for bankruptcy and, at Livy\u2019s insistence, agreed to repay his creditors in full, undertaking an arduous world tour to generate income. Partly due to bouts of illness and cancellations, the expected financial windfall didn\u2019t materialize; at the end of it, Susy, who alone among the family had returned to Hartford, contracted spinal meningitis and died at 24. Around the same time, Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy and Clara, who desperately wanted to break free from the controlling influence of her parents, found herself pressed into nursing her ailing mother.<\/p>\n
Chernow navigates these tumultuous years, which form roughly the latter half of\u00a0Mark Twain, with aplomb. He gives full voice to Clara\u2019s frustrations\u2014and Jean\u2019s, too: after Livy\u2019s death in 1904, she was shunted off to various sanatoriums in a futile attempt to cure her illness. Quoting from her diaries and correspondence, Chernow sketches a deeply sympathetic portrait of an observant, capable, love-starved young woman who was anything but the helpless invalid her well-meaning but short-sighted parents imagined her to be.<\/p>\n
He does well, too, untangling the exasperating web of relationships that marked Twain\u2019s last years, especially those between the author, his live-in official biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, his secretary-cum-housekeeper Isabel Lyon, and manservant (later Lyon\u2019s husband) Robert Ashton. The latter couple\u2019s betrayal of his trusting nature was a late blow, though not nearly so shattering as Jean\u2019s death from an apparent heart attack induced by a seizure on Christmas Eve 1909. Four months later, Twain joined her, Livy, and Susy in the cemetery in Elmira, NY. (Clara lived until 1962.)<\/p>\n
Additionally, Chernow delves into Twain\u2019s obsession with prepubescent girls (the so-called \u201cAngelfish\u201d) during the last period of his life. While not offering any diagnoses, neither does he undermine the most likely explanation: that Twain, whose gloom and pessimism were profound, was engaging in a misguided attempt to revive the halcyon days of family life that were, by then, long gone.<\/p>\n
Despite the occasionally dark tint of some of Twain\u2019s missives to the Angelfish, Chernow suggests that this was a strange but probably harmless fetish (the children were always chaperoned and no suggestions of impropriety emerged at the time or afterwards). That Clara and Jean resented the girls\u2019 intrusion into their father\u2019s life (and his commensurate neglect of them) is perfectly understandable, which helps explain Clara\u2019s downplaying of Twain\u2019s odd habit in his official biography.<\/p>\n
In the midst of all these goings-on, Twain managed to churn out some of the seminal American literature of the late 19th\u00a0century: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court, among them. Chernow discusses each in full and, while one might quibble with his du jour verdicts, that\u2019s par for a Twain biography. Suffice it to say, individual shortcomings in this highly autobiographical fare reflect their author, as do the books\u2019 considerable strengths.<\/p>\n
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1889 edition of Mark Twain\u2019s A Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court.<\/p>\n
Chief among the last were Twain\u2019s deep empathy for the downtrodden and his fearlessness speaking truth to power, virtues that emerge in nearly all of his major (and many of his lesser) works.\u00a0Also notable is Twain\u2019s model of the artist as an engaged social critic. To paraphrase Jonathan Swift, he knew to use the point of his pen, not the feather.<\/p>\n
Though he had many blind spots that cost him dearly in his business dealings and personal life, Twain was, throughout his life, remarkably clear-eyed about injustice, abuse, and profligacy in the public sphere. As the United States continues reckoning with the evils of racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and nativism\u2014not to mention the nauseating spectacle of Christian hypocrisy, Gilded Age-worthy corruption, and creeping authoritarianism\u2014his example continues to resonate.<\/p>\n
Though one might wistfully wonder what Twain would have to say about the particulars of our current predicament, the fact is, he wrestled with many of the most pressing issues of our day (or their root causes) in his. Along the way, he found a ready antidote.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur race,\u201d he told his rambling, 500,000-word\u00a0Autobiography, \u201chas unquestionably one really effective weapon\u2014laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution\u2014these can lift a colossal humbug\u2014push it a little, weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or, as Twain put it in his notebook in 1888, \u201cirreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.\u201d Few of any era practiced that art more diligently or brilliantly. However imperfect his subject\u2019s efforts, Chernow\u2019s biography suggests that we\u2019d do well to cultivate a similar brew of knowing impertinence to contend with the demands of our own troubled age.<\/p>\n
Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jonathan Blumhofer At its best, Mark Twain emerges in this biography as much a live wire as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18933,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-18932","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}