Mark Twain
By Ron Chernow.
Penguin Press, 2025.
Hardcover, 1,200 pages, $45.
Reviewed by Chuck Chalberg.
Let us stipulate at the outset that Ron Chernow has indeed covered the Twain waterfront in this massive volume. How could he not? Twain appears “Afloat” in Part One, rises to “Floodtide” in Part Two, struggles through the “Rapids” in Part Three, is swept into a “Whirlpool” in Part Four, and finally succumbs to “Shipwreck” in Part Five.
Water was a constant in Twain’s life, especially the muddied waters of the mighty Mississippi. But oceans were in play as well, given his multiple (29) Atlantic crossings, his occasional sails along the Atlantic coast to Bermuda, as well as in and around the Caribbean, plus a world tour that took him across both the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Even the Mediterranean Sea did not escape a Twain visit, if not a Twain plunge.
Let it also be stipulated that this doorstopper, no make that ballast, of a biography is a mostly great read. It’s not a one-sitting reading to be sure, but it’s a pleasure to read nonetheless, no matter the number of sittings required to complete it. To call it a page-turner would be at once trite and inaccurate. A detective yarn this is not. But Chernow himself is a detective of sorts. So let’s regard his work as a next-crisis or next-scheme or next-adventure or next-novel anticipator. There, that should do the trick, as well as keep all potential readers alert and afloat.
Of course, this biography could have been shortened. But early on in the writing process, somewhere while his subject was still buoyant and fully “afloat,” Chernow must have decided to risk sinking him by not bothering to skimp on the details. At the same time, there must have been days when the author also had to have worried about sinking himself. In any case, whether it was the right decision or a good decision is almost beside the point, since stories involving both the public Twain and the private Twain make for equally compelling reading.
One telling little detail deserves immediate mention. It is June of 1907. Twain had just arrived (yet again) in England to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford. As far as he was concerned, such an award was long overdue. He may have “skipped college” (as Chernow puts it), but he surely “knew his worth in the literary world and felt that, for too long, major universities had snubbed him” when it came to handing out their honorary accolades.
Twain could be something other than bashful when it came to his own take on his literary “worth.” As he autobiographically put it, “I am quite well aware that for a generation I have been as widely celebrated a literary person as America has ever produced . . . and have stood at the head of my guild all that time, with none to dispute the place with me.” Chernow judges this to have been “as full-throated an expression of confidence, even conceit, as Mark Twain ever allowed himself.”
And a justifiable conceit it was. If Twain had had any lingering doubts, justifiable or otherwise, about his standing, they were eliminated shortly after his ship docked in England on that late spring day of 1907. How so? The stevedores cheered him as he strolled down the gangplank. And what did Twain do in response? He “lifted his hat in salute.” What a wonderful little detail–and a telling one to boot.
After all, it tells us a good deal about the depth of his appeal among readers and the height of his standing as a celebrity, and America’s first literary celebrity at that. More than that, he was a deserving celebrity, as opposed to Daniel Boorstin’s ”The Image”-defined celebrity. In other words, Twain was not simply well known for his well-knownness; he was well known for his actual and considerable accomplishments.
As such, he was more than willing to be anything but bashful when it came to trading on his name and his fame and those accomplishments, whether to make a political point, establish himself as a sage, advance a daughter’s musical career, rescue himself from debt, or promote this or that get-rich-quick scheme. Ironically, the literary figure who had great fun at the expense of the Gilded Age, a term he had coined, was himself a frequent victim of that same age.
To be sure, there were opportunities aplenty in that rambunctious post-Civil War era, many of them golden and some of them foolhardy. For Twain, the would-be tycoon, all such ventures proved to be foolhardy, save one, namely Grant’s memoirs, which Twain published (but did not write). However, even that success came at a considerable cost, since it convinced Twain that he had a talent for the publishing business (which he did not, as his subsequent failures at that enterprise amply proved).
Still, he came away from his dealings with Grant with great admiration for the former president, who was dying of cancer, but determined to complete his memoirs and save his wife from impoverishment. For Twain, it was one more step away from his Confederate youth, if not a step toward the ever-elusive financial security that forever managed to escape him.
No matter the collapse of this or that scheme/venture, no matter how quickly he would succumb to the next temptation, and no matter his volatile temper, provoked by his easily aroused sense of grievance and sustained by a well-honed ability to develop and hold a grudge, Twain was generally kept in at least a measure of check by both internal and external forces. Alone atop the list of the latter would be his wife Livy, who, according to her husband, “edited” both his work and him.
The Twain marriage was a genuine love match, as well as a source of considerable financial resources thanks to Livy’s coal magnate father, resources that Twain managed to squander well before he reached the shipwreck stage of his life following Livy’s death in 1904.
The other women in his life caused him more grief, worry, frustration, guilt, and anger than anything approaching satisfaction. Nor did they ever serve as official or unofficial Twain monitors, much less editors. Atop this secondary list would be his three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean. Susy died of spinal meningitis at twenty-four. Clara sought a musical career as a pianist or a singer. She had some, “but not enough talent,” according to Chernow. She also did–and did not–want to trade on Twain’s name and celebrity. Jean suffered from epilepsy and died following a seizure at twenty-nine.
Then there was Isabel Lyon, whose role and life with Twain following Livy’s death was filled with ambiguities. She lived on the premises and had great affection and admiration for Twain. While there was nothing scandalous or untoward about their relationship, she did serve as his companion, hostess, secretary, money manager, as well as a surrogate mother of sorts to his adult daughters. Ultimately, she may have embezzled money from him and, in his eyes, therefore, betrayed him, thereby assuring that her name would be added to his always-growing personal enemies list.
At the same time, Twain was not without male figures of more than minor importance, even though there never seems to have been a one-and-only confidante. His older brother Orion might have been that, but Twain’s success seemed to stand between them. His younger brother Henry might one day have become that, but he died tragically in a steamboat explosion while still a youth.
Other possible candidates might have been fellow novelist William Dean Howells, who regarded Twain as the “most anti-southern southerner” he’d ever met, Henry Rogers, a Rockefeller associate who saved Twain from the verge of bankruptcy more than once, and the Reverend Joseph Twichell of the Hartford Congregational Church, where occasional congregant Twain would–and wouldn’t–try to please Livy by becoming a believer.
The internal forces were his irrepressible sense of humor and his built-in ability to repress any untoward actions on his own part. Chernow alternately refers to Twain’s puritanical bent, a bent that had nothing to do with religion or theology and everything to do with behavior, and his essential and elemental “prudery.” There was never a hint of scandal to be associated with Twain, not even during those shipwreck years when the widower Twain developed (or revealed) a fascination for his “angelfish,” pre-pubescent or barely pubescent girls.
Detective Chernow seems not to have been on the lookout for any reason (or excuse) to indict Twain for this or that misstep or transgression. Nor did Chernow transform himself into a modern-day Tom Sawyer out to whitewash much more than a neighbor’s fence. Instead, he has given us Mark Twain warts and all, and there is plenty of room for both, meaning both gentle criticism and undisguised praise in these many pages.
This is just as it should be since Twain took his country, warts and all, and loved it just the same. This was even the case, nay, maybe even especially the case, when it came to the troubling history of race relations in America. Twain has been regarded—and deserves to be regarded—as the most important white author of his era to contend with the history and legacy of American slavery.
At the same time, Twain very much saw himself as a cosmopolitan. How could that not have been the case, given the many years that he lived in Europe, including the consecutive years that occupied nearly all of the 1890s? The Sam Clemens who never forgot his Missouri or his Mississippi River youth was also very much at home in Hartford or New York City—or in London or Vienna, for that matter.
Furthermore, he didn’t always love the American people; heck, he often didn’t like them, whether individually or en masse. It could never be said of Twain that he disliked this or that person, but loved humanity. But it might well be said of him that he disliked, even hated, more than his share of individuals, as well as the human race in general.
In fact, his atheism, which bordered on agnosticism (or should that be his agnosticism which bordered on atheism?), is probably best attributed to his questioning how a god or God could have done such a terrible job of what should have been its or His most important creation. But since Twain recognized and understood his own failings and weaknesses, his own foibles and inconsistencies, he was at least well-positioned, if not always inclined, to come to terms with the same in others. For that matter, while he may not have been tempted to thank heaven or anyone in it for his sense of humor, he must have been thankful for it nonetheless. Certainly, it was his saving grace, and one suspects that he knew it, since he certainly and frequently relied on it.
Does Ron Chernow know it as well? There are moments when one wonders, but he frequently chooses to bail out a barely afloat Twain by resorting to a great Twain one-liner, which is precisely what Twain himself often managed to do—at least until he reached shipwreck status. But even then, he was not entirely bereft of the occasional choice, if now mostly rueful, retort.
Of course, both Chernow and Twain knew that Twain was a very funny fellow. And of course, they have both also known that Twain very much wanted to be regarded as something much more than that. Sometime during his “floodtide” years, he began to see himself as a sage and a political commentator as well. In fact, that vision never really left him and at times seemed to dominate him, even consume him, as he negotiated his “rapids” and floundered in his “whirlpool” before facing utter “shipwreck.”
It is Chernow’s judgment that Twain’s standing as a novelist suffered greatly over the course of the last few decades of his writing life, because it was during those years when Twain, the political sage, sought to upstage Twain, the literary creator.
One can only wonder what and who else Twain might have created had he not let himself be sidelined by the current of daily events or distracted by the next money-making scheme that had bobbed into view. In a very real sense, it’s amazing that his literary canon was as large and as great as it was, given the self-imposed demands he placed on the rest of his public and private lives.
Otherwise, Chernow confines most of his judgments to his introduction. Twain was “fiercely pessimistic.” He was “implacable” in his hatreds. He was a “shameless self-promoter.” There was a “large assortment of weird sides to his nature.” And this: “Probably no other American writer has led such an eventful life.” To be sure!
Still, one finishes this lengthy book by wishing that it might have been a few pages longer. Why another Twain biography now, Mr. Chernow? Maybe the answer might be this. Here we are in the midst of a great cultural divide between our elites and our masses. On which side of that divide might the “Youth” (Livy’s nickname for her husband) from Hannibal, or the sage from the east coast, have fallen, and why?
Just what might your subject have to say to us today? Where would he find himself and how would–or should–he be thought of today? Chernow appears to be quite content to leave possible answers to all such questions to his readers.
Of course, any answers to such questions would be inevitably speculative, necessarily elusive, even downright impossible. But they are all worth a try, especially at this historical moment–and especially on the part of an author who made such an investment of time and effort and now expects his readers to make a significant investment of time and effort as well.
The additional problem here is that Twain’s politics also covered the waterfront. He was a southern sympathizer who became a post-Civil War radical Republican. He was both an enemy of greed (Jay Gould was the “mightiest disaster.”) and a captive of it. He was a Republican who voted for Grover Cleveland in 1884 and who, a few years later, couldn’t bring himself to vote for either his Nebraska neighbor William Jennings Bryan or the very Republican William McKinley.
He had deep sympathy for the plight of the slave and the descendants of slaves. Therefore, he was a strong supporter of civil rights legislation, anti-lynching laws, and of Booker T. Washington. But he thought Theodore Roosevelt had erred in inviting the President of Tuskegee Institute to dine at the White House, and he speculated that the ultimate and only solution to the country’s racial issues/divide was the gradual shading of the color line by intermarriage.
He endorsed the 1898 American war against Spain to liberate Cuba, but fiercely opposed the taking of the Philippines. Both Roosevelt and Twain received honorary degrees from Yale at the same ceremony. The students cheered Twain for his opposition to what he (and they) regarded as American imperialism, leaving TR grimacing and muttering that he wanted to “skin him alive.”
Twain sought favors from Roosevelt even as he could dismiss him as the Tom Sawyer of his age. Like Tom, TR would go to “Halifax for half a chance to show off, and he would go to hell for a whole one.” Actually, the same thing might be said of Twain himself. He, too, had a strong desire to be noticed. Why else would he have rotated fourteen white suits? Why else would he have subjected himself to the lecture circuit, which he not so cordially hated? Oh yes, there were those never-ending money problems. And oh yes, he discovered, much to his surprise and satisfaction, that he was very good at entertaining and holding an adoring audience.
An undisguised cosmopolitan who never wanted to forget his boyhood in the American heartland, Mark Twain was a walking—and strolling—contradiction. But then he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Just ask him as he responded to the honest cheers of those English stevedores, while anticipating the fawning praise of Oxford dons.
John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Minnesota and once performed as G. K. Chesterton.
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