The Americans are even more prone than the British to the biographical doorstopper as a way in which to honour the lives, minute by minute, of their famous dead. Walter Isaacson and Jon Meacham are among the most distinguished exponents of the genre, but its undisputed master is Ron Chernow. After cutting his teeth on accounts of banking dynasties (the Morgans and the Warburgs), Chernow moved on to biography. First, to John D Rockefeller, then to the lives of the founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. More recently, he turned his careful attentions to the 18th president and Civil War-winning general Ulysses S Grant. Although Chernow’s books have sold innumerable copies and won a fistful of prizes, his greatest coup may have been a matter of luck. The writer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda picked up a copy of Alexander Hamilton when on holiday. As he leafed through its pages, he began to see that Hamilton’s life could be reconfigured as a hip-hop musical drama. The rest is theatrical history—and led to even more sales for Chernow.
Chernow’s new doorstopper (1,174 pages and a full 69 chapters) takes as its subject Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Clemens was born in rural Missouri in 1835, the sixth of seven children (four of whom would die in childhood), before in due course transforming himself into the phenomenon we know as Mark Twain.
The story is a remarkable one, not least for offering the United States an image of its 19th-century self as it would like to be seen. Becoming Mark Twain may not quite have qualified as a journey from log cabin to White House, but was in its own way iconic. Wit and energy and sheer worldly panache took Twain from humble origins to global renown and the 14 white suits (one for each day of the week, with seven going to the cleaners at a time) that he kept in the Connecticut mansion in which he died. What is more, in the years after the Civil War, he was—as a Southerner who had fought for the Confederacy, now living and prospering in the North—vital to the reconstruction of something like a common American identity. He even helped Grant to publish his memoirs. Was he rough around the edges and sometimes excessive? Yes, but his readers found in him a likeness of what they saw as their ascendant decency. Case in point: some of his earlier writings may have evinced the anti-black racism that had long been used to disguise the monstrosity of chattel slavery, but in later life he denounced slavery and racism along with American colonialism in the Philippines. He’d have found much to write about in the US of the 2020s.
The fact remains that most writers do not lead active lives akin to those of generals, banking dynasts or senior politicians: they do a lot of sitting around with pen in hand or in front of a keyboard, hoping that the muse will agree to keep them company. It follows that literary biography is, at its best, as much about how a particular writer came to write his or her work as about reconstructing the circumstances of a life; or, rather, it is about showing how the reconstructed circumstances of an author’s life can help us better understand his or her writing. Chernow does Chernow as assiduously as ever, but I’m not sure that his Mark Twain is up to this challenge.
Ernest Hemingway declared that ‘all modern American literature comes from... Huckleberry Finn’
Twain’s masterpieces—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his memoir Life on the Mississippi and his travelogue Innocents Abroad—are all but universally praised. William Faulkner thought that Twain was “the father of American literature” and found traces of his DNA in the 20th-century American writing he most admired. Ernest Hemingway went further, declaring that “all modern American literature comes from one book... called Huckleberry Finn… All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick would like a word, but the hyperbole is forgivable.
The opening lines of Huckleberry Finn give some idea of Twain’s skill and audacity: “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” Twain’s use of regional dialect is crucial. Through it, we get to see and hear Huck coming to terms with his appreciation of Jim as a fellow human being, someone for whom he feels friendship and who should not be treated as the object of anyone else’s proprietary rights. This culminates in the extraordinary scene where Huck decides that, although helping Jim to escape his bondage would see him sent to hell for self-conscious wrongdoing, he was going to do it anyway: “I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him.” Still, although Twain took pains to ensure that Jim spoke an accurate version of the Missouri slave dialects, Jim is not a character with a complex inner life of his own. As Ralph Ellison observed, he must be seen as “a white man’s inadequate portrait of a slave”—and although that inadequacy must be seen primarily as Huck’s, it is not Huck’s alone. This blind spot has recently been addressed in a novel that, I suspect, Twain would have enjoyed: Percival Everett’s James, which vividly imagines Jim as someone who probes at the limits of human freedom with the aid of Kierkegaard, Plato and Voltaire.
Just how did Sam Clemens, a school dropout working as a river pilot on the Mississippi, come so thoroughly to transcend not just the circumstances but the mentality and mores of his upbringing? Writerly autodidacts were a common enough 19th-century phenomenon (Melville’s Ishmael, perhaps speaking for Melville himself, claims that “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard”), but how did this one become the author revered by Hemingway, Faulkner and many others besides? Chernow is good on Twain’s ambition, drive and frequent shamelessness, but these are necessary rather than sufficient considerations. If a life of Twain is to do its job properly, to explain how the man and the writer intersect with and inform one another, it needs to do more—to linger over the disposition of Twain’s developing mind, the reading that helped set the horizons his own work frequently crossed, the writing in which he came by stages to find his folksy-sharp voice as a journalist, satirist and fictioneer.
Instead, Chernow presents us with one carefully documented event after another, many of them related to Twain’s deep-seated desire for riches, and to the near-calamitous failures of judgement to which this desire led him in his business ventures. But the effect is to take the reader further and further away from a sense of what it was that made Twain the writer unique. To be sure, Twain was one of the first culturally ubiquitous celebrities, whose opinions were sought on a dizzying array of topics in the emerging mass media. As such, he has a claim on the attentions of cultural historians. It’s just that the rest of us care about him because of his books. Here, Chernow loses the signal while amplifying the noise. We are presented with everything we might possibly want to know about Twain, other than why he is interesting and important.
Chernow takes the reader further and further away from what it was that made Twain unique
If Chernow’s discomfort with Twain the writer leads him to bombard us with too many extraneous facts, his prose smothers us with too many extraneous words. Although he remains readable in the best tradition of American reportage, he too often walks a line between the tautologous, the pleonastic and the exhaustedly purple: truths are “untrammelled”, spells are “wondrous”, touchstones are “magical”, seriousness is “deadly”, critiques are “profound”, loyalties are “fierce”, happiness is “unalloyed”, hatreds are “implacable”, sadnesses are “ineffable”, and so on. All of these from the first nine pages of text. Striving for a certain grandeur, Chernow attains an over-copious automaticity that is the opposite of what one finds in Twain; think of a love letter written by an imperfect AI programme.
Then there are the repetitions. The repetitions. One example will have to suffice: over the course of three pages towards the end of the book, we are told four (and possibly five) times that neither opioid painkillers nor the knowledge of his imminent death could halt Twain’s wisecracking. Once would have been enough, but Chernow wants to generate pathos and so can’t help himself. Maybe Chernow is now too much of a fixture to be corrected, but Mark Twain would have been a shorter and better piece of writing for the labours of a conscientious editor.
