Why Twain Endures

Mark Twain
by ron chernow
penguin, 1,200 pages, $45

When the ­Civil War broke out in 1861, Sam ­Clemens (not yet “Mark Twain”) didn’t know where to stand. He was twenty-­five years old, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River—a job he’d obtained by paying an ­experienced pilot $500 to train him. As a boy, ­Clemens had “craved attention,” writes Ron Chernow in this hefty biography, “and nobody drew more than the pilot, who wore fancy duds and enjoyed an ‘exalted respect’ as he strutted about town.” Sam savored every minute on board, as readers of Life on the Mississippi know, and it paid well, too. He bought swanky clothes and flashed $100 bills. The work itself he spoke of as “play—delightful play, vigorous play, adventurous play—and I loved it,” though dangers ever lurked. The sands and currents shifted all the time, and boats weren’t always safe. Three years earlier, his beloved younger brother Henry had died of burns suffered when the boilers exploded on a ship on which Henry served as a clerk. For days in the hospital, Sam watched amid thirty other scalded patients as his brother succumbed. Now, the career was over. Gunboats roamed the waters and the Union had set a blockade at Memphis, ending commercial traffic from there to New Orleans. Sam was on the last boat to sneak through, its smokestacks struck by bullets and its windows shattered.

In Chernow’s description of the war coming to Missouri in those heated months and forcing on every citizen the most serious questions, Sam doesn’t seem to have held any political opinions at all. He disliked slavery, but not enough to become an abolitionist. In New Orleans on the day Louisiana left the Union, he found the boisterous speeches and rejoicing a little comical. National politics didn’t interest him, only what was close by: Nearly all the pilots and captains he knew favored secession, so he did, too. His hometown of Hannibal was decked with Confederate flags until Union troops showed up; when Sam and two others returned there from St. Louis, a lieutenant in blue advanced to the dock, arrested them, and hauled them back to the city, where a general pressured them to serve on the bridges of his troop ships. When female visitors arrived at the general’s quarters and attracted his notice, “the three pilots skedaddled out a side door and escaped to safety.”

Sam proceeded to join the Marion Rangers, a small militia not officially tied to the Confederacy but certainly hostile to Northern occupiers. He was not enthusiastic. Two weeks later, hearing of a Union regiment closing in, he and a few others took off and never rejoined the group. That counted as desertion. Soon after, when his older brother ­Orion secured a post as Secretary of the Nevada Territory, Sam jumped at the opportunity to go with him and avoid having to pick a side and fight. That’s the entirety of his Civil War experience. Chernow lays it out in galloping detail and holds off from editorializing too much on the young man’s disinterest. Still, it is one of the curiosities of our literary history that the writer who would come to be identified with the essence of American ­experience—an “emblem of Americana,” Chernow calls him—who would portray black–white companionship movingly in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and reflect trenchantly on racial stereotypes and socialization in Pudd’nhead Wilson, didn’t really lean one way or the other as his nation underwent its greatest moral convulsion.

Chernow is author of the renowned biography of Alexander Hamilton that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway show. He maintains an engaging pace until the very last page, 1,033 (!), which quotes the New York Times as stating just after Twain’s death in 1910: “His personality and his humor have been an integral part of American life for so long that it has seemed almost impossible to realize an America without him.” I describe the Civil War incidents because they illustrate the impossibility of fixing upon Twain a consistent outlook or ethic, in spite of his national stature.

In Mark Twain we watch a man ever on the move, with confrontations and small scandals erupting, friendships and partnerships flipping into betrayal and deceit, plans hatched and foiled, and writing never ceasing. Chernow recounts one compelling episode after another, some ludicrous and some sad, citing letters and news accounts, remembrances by friends and enemies, Twain’s notebooks and papers (mostly collected in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley), documents in the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford and dozens of other archives and libraries, plus guidance from curators of those sites, including the head of the Mark Twain Cave Complex, where visitors may go underground and imagine Tom Sawyer on one of his zany adventures.

Notables pass in and out, among them Ulysses S. Grant, encountered by Twain at a reception in Washington, D.C., while Grant was still commander of the ­army under President Johnson, and whom Twain describes as “poor, modest, bored, unhappy Grant . . . a particularly plain-looking man.” Years later, Grant’s Memoirs would become a fabulous success for the publishing house Twain directed; the men would meet and converse as the manuscript moved toward publication in Grant’s final weeks of life, laughing over having nearly faced one another during Twain’s short service in the Missouri militia. When he hears that the officer was just a couple miles away at that time, Twain boasts: “I supposed it was just some ordinary Colonel of no particular consequence, & so I let him go.” Grant the hardened soldier is amused by this Falstaff, and Chernow guesses that the humorist’s talk gives the former president some therapeutic relief. Twain himself comments in his notebook: “It is curious and dreadful to sit up this way & talk cheerful nonsense to Gen. Grant & he under sentence of death with that cancer.”

From Virginia City, where he worked as a journalist scribbling sensational stories of killings and satirical reports of political ­chicanery—a future senator would call him “the most lovable scamp and nuisance who ever ­blighted Nevada”—Twain went to San ­Francisco, then to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), before returning to the East Coast on a ship on which cholera broke out and caused several deaths, before voyaging to the Holy Land with a pack of Christians on pilgrimage, all the while recording his experience of people and places for newspapers at increasing rates of pay. The upright captain of the Quaker City, which carried the passengers across the Atlantic, worded his first observations of the man this way: “a tall, lanky, unkempt, unwashed individual, who seemed to be full of whiskey or something like it, and who filled my office with the fumes of bad liquor.” Twain replied in print that this proud figure of abstinence “is a mighty good judge of whiskey at second hand.”

Despite the book’s tiresomely repetitive condemnations of Twain’s harsh judgments on the foreigners and non-whites whom he encounters (Twain is “full of racial denigration, puffed up with American pride”), Chernow neatly conveys the ­uneven mix of “blasphemous laughs” and genuine solemnity on these early trips. Twain notes wryly that John the Baptist in a painting in Madrid looks a lot like a Spaniard, while in Dublin he’s all Irish. In Genoa, a guide says that St. John’s ashes sit in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, and Twain remarks that he and the other tourists had seen John’s ashes already in another church. And yet, in Jerusalem he buys his pious mother a King James Bible, steals a few bits from Solomon’s Temple, and climbs the stairs to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre “with a far more absorbing interest than I had ever felt in any earthly thing before.”

Other ambivalences surface in later vignettes. Twain astutely detects frauds and fantasists—and yet still gets conned and cheated, or seduced by canny dreamers such as James Paige, into whose mammoth typesetting-machine project Twain poured money for years despite recognizing him as “a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity.” (When Twain urged Andrew ­Carnegie over dinner one night to consider investing, adding that it was ­unwise to keep his eggs in one basket, ­Carnegie replied, “That’s a mistake, put all your eggs into one basket—and watch that basket.”) Twain takes his family to Bayreuth for the annual festival, even though, he declares, “I hate the very name of opera,” and quips after attending Parsifal that he enjoyed the two-hour first act “in spite of the singing.” But Twain also says, “Certainly nothing in the world is so solemn & impressive, & so divinely beautiful as Tannhäuser.”

In the stories he tells in public and in private, Twain slips from the lightly whimsical to the lethal and dark with uncanny ease—for instance, in the case of Boggs in Huck Finn, which starts with sassy joshing between drunken Boggs and some townsfolk and ends with the man shot in the street by Colonel Sherburn and bleeding to death as his daughter howls and Huck watches in fascination. (Chernow gives the lynch mob that forms and confronts Sherburn a racial angle, but in fact race has nothing to do with it.) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court could have been “a lovely, droll book” about a practical New England craftsman “awakening in picturesque Camelot,” Chernow remarks. I remember the movie version with Bing Crosby, which fulfilled that very formula. The novel ends, however, in a “strangely violent fantasy” in which Hank “has become a mass murderer of twenty-five thousand knights in his aborted attempt to create a republic.”

As Twain’s seventy-four years unfold, we wonder how such a reckless smart-aleck, an inconstant cynic with a poison pen, a scruffy fellow with cigar in mouth and whiskey-breath, will rise to be an American idol. The life Chernow tells is a series of private and public misjudgments. Twain believed that Francis Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays; he drove his daughter crazy with his veritable obsession with Joan of Arc; he hired people who ripped him off; he mismanaged his finances, and his family suffered; shady schemes didn’t bother him; he “roasted” Emerson, ­Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes at a dinner in honor of John Greenleaf Whittier and spent the following weeks ashamed and mortified that the jokes had fallen flat, issuing apologies as the press amplified his blunder . . . Yet the Hearst Syndicate offered him “a whopping fee” to cover Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, an impresario in 1897 promised him $50,000 for an American lecture tour, and a silly story about a “jumping frog” published in the Saturday Review “set all New York in a roar,” according to one observer.

Audiences across the world had never seen a stage persona like his. In the words of a reviewer in ­Sydney:

His characteristic attitude is to stand quite still, with his right arm across the abdomen and the left resting on it and supporting his chin. In this way he talks on for nearly two hours; and, while the audience is laughing uproariously, he never by any chance relapses into a smile.

If you can make people laugh even as they sense serious undertones in the wit, they’ll forgive a lot. Twain did that again and again. The final ­sentences of Huck Finn alone (“I reckon . . .”) suffice to prove his literary greatness. A thousand more sayings do, too. “Who knows,” Aunt Polly says of Tom Sawyer, “he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!” “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry,” Pudd’nhead Wilson records in his calendar. Long after the war ended, Twain’s account of his militia time concluded with a claim that he’d mastered a crucial talent of soldiering: “I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.” In his final days, Twain composed “Etiquette for the Afterlife,” which advised souls how to act when they reach the Pearly Gates (“Do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to . . . You can ask for his autograph . . . Leave your dog outside . . .”).

Chernow sprinkles these jests and ironies throughout the story; they explain the enduring attraction. To joke though the end is near, to express in a way that evokes a sympathetic smile the awful loneliness of a runaway boy with no home or family, to acknowledge one’s all-too-human stupidity and carry on nonetheless as a lifelong member of the human comedy . . . in the words of William Dean ­Howells, who gazed at his friend in the coffin and discerned “the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him,” that’s “My Mark Twain.”