Ron Chernow is best known for “Alexander Hamilton,” his 2004 biography that inspired the popular hip-hop musical. Chernow, who has also written books about George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant, is especially good as a popular historian, placing his subjects within a sweeping canvas of their times. That sensibility also informs “Mark Twain,” Chernow’s new biography of America’s most famous writer.
In true Chernow fashion, this is a book about not only Twain, but also the modern celebrity culture that nurtured his career – and that he helped in large part to create. It’s also the story of how Twain’s emotionally austere father shaped Twain’s hunger for attention, which took a strange late-life turn.
Despite its uncomfortable facts, “Mark Twain” isn’t primarily a revisionist takedown. While Twain’s need for the spotlight drove his ambitions as a self-dramatist, his keen sense of theater rested at the heart of his literary genius, too. Like Charles Dickens, another 19th-century literary lion who divided his time between the writing desk and the lecture hall, Twain had a sharp ear for the performative possibilities of the English language.
Why We Wrote This
Mark Twain not only wove elaborate tall tales and wildly entertaining novels, but also shaped himself into America’s first modern celebrity, according to biographer Ron Chernow.
“With his inexhaustible commentary,” Chernow writes, “he bestrode a larger stage than any other American writer, coining aphorisms that made him the country’s most-quoted person. He created a literary voice that was wholly American, capturing the vernacular of western towns and small villages where a new culture had arisen, far from staid eastern precincts.”
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Early exploits provided fodder
Born Samuel Clemens in small-town Missouri in 1835, Twain had little formal schooling but a gift for experiment. Early on, he improvised a career as a printer, journalist, and steamboat pilot, his eclectic experiences providing fodder for clever commentaries, tall tales, and travelogues. The title of “The Gilded Age,” an 1873 novel that Twain co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner, became a defining label of America’s freewheeling and often corrupt era during the industrial boom that followed the Civil War. But Twain’s most enduring claim to fame would be “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” his 1884 novel about Huck, a young boy who is morally transformed by his friendship with Jim, a man escaping slavery. Its critique of racism, radical for its time, was made all the more memorable by Twain’s embrace of colloquial American English in telling his story. In doing so, he gave Americans a sense that there was poetry in their mother tongue, the makings of a true national literature.
Our first modern celebrity
Like every Twain biographer, Chernow mentions Twain’s anecdote about being born when Halley’s comet brightened the sky. It reappeared in 1910, the year of Twain’s death, a bit of symmetry that pointed to his life as a circle, its essentials remaining the same.
In a larger sense, though, Twain’s life was an epic of seismic change. Born in a provincial place, he’d eventually witness the coming of the telephone, automobile, and airplane. Twain was fascinated by gadgets – sometimes to a fault, losing a fortune when he lavishly invested in a typesetting-machine scheme. He recouped some of his losses on the lecture circuit, where his signature snowy mane and bushy mustache created a global buzz.
Twain was, in many ways, our first modern star, dividing his life – sometimes precariously – into private and public selves. He was both Samuel Clemens, husband and father, and Mark Twain, the persona behind a pen name he’d borrowed from a riverboat term for “two fathoms deep.”
“Mark Twain’s foremost creation – his richest and most complex gift to posterity – may well have been his own inimitable personality, the biggest literary personality that America has produced,” Chernow writes.
Chernow describes how Clemens cultivated Mark Twain not only as a literary figure, but also as an international brand. As Twain’s career matured, Chernow writes, “He had graduated from being merely famous to a relatively new category of ‘celebrity,’ his name and face instantly recognizable, his personality transformed into a trademark. He understood the secret of modern celebrity – that ‘conspicuousness is the only thing necessary in a person to command our interest and, in a larger or smaller sense, our worship.’”
A big part of Twain’s brand was his iconoclasm, a passion for dissent that naturally attracted attention. Twain, who looked askance at both organized religion and conventional medicine, also began in the 1890s and early 1900s to criticize and satirize Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement and of this newspaper. While Chernow appears to concur with at least some of Twain’s notions about the church, he includes a caveat: “There was an obsessive quality to Twain’s writings on Mary Baker Eddy, his bottomless capacity for anger again grasping a target and not letting go.”
Twain was keen to monetize his name recognition, even designing a board game for learning history, Mark Twain’s Memory-
Builder, which he patented in 1885. Sales were less than stellar; it seems that not even Twain’s luster could make the game’s dull concept a winner.
Chernow’s writing remains uniformly crisp, but his comprehensiveness accounts for the book’s length. At some 1,200 pages, this probably isn’t a title to tote to the beach. Readers hoping for a shorter read might want to check out “Mark Twain: A Life” by Ron Powers or Richard B. Lyttle’s “Mark Twain: The Man and His Adventures.”
On the other hand, Chernow’s outsize “Mark Twain” is an apt reflection of his outsize subject. Twain was larger than life, and he wanted fans to know it. Chernow includes a funny story about Twain’s days in New York, when he would time his Sunday walks “so as to pass churches as congregants spilled onto the sidewalk, and he would be mobbed by admirers.”
A passion for the limelight
Twain longed for attention at home, too. The adage about egoists who want to be the bride at every wedding proved literally true. At his daughter Clara’s nuptials, Twain wore a scarlet ceremonial robe, a choice designed to steal the show.
It’s possible that his passion for the limelight drove Twain’s gathering, in his final years, of a group of girls between the ages of 10 and 16 he dubbed the Aquarium Club – a spin on his nickname for the members as “angelfish.” As Chernow observes, “It is important to note that while Twain adopted an unhealthily flirtatious tone with the angelfish, presenting himself as their lovesick swain, he was never accused of acting on such impulses or engaging in predatory behavior. Though, heaven knows, his actual behavior was odd enough.”
Chernow offers no firm conclusions about Twain’s short-lived preoccupation with the Aquarium Club. “He is a fascinating, maddening puzzle to anyone trying to figure him out,” Chernow writes.
Perhaps no one can fully resolve the mystery of the man who lived as both Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain. Chernow’s mammoth tale might be as close as we come to an answer.
A selection of Twain-isms
Even people who have never read a Mark Twain book know about his wit. His frequent presence in lecture halls advanced him as one of America’s earliest stand-up comedians, and many of his wry witticisms, whether they were written or performed, remain part of the public conversation. Here are a few:
You can’t pray a lie.
The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
To succeed in business, avoid my example.
Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
“Classic”: A book which people praise and don’t read.
One of the most striking things about a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it.
