MARK TWAIN, by Ron Chernow
Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion. Chernow, who has previously written lives of financial titans, war heroes and founding fathers, misses the man William Faulkner called “the father of American literature” almost entirely. He demonstrates little feeling for the deeper and least domesticated regions of Twain’s art, or for the literary context of his era. His book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign.
Chernow is the author, most famously, of “Alexander Hamilton” (2004), which Lin-Manuel Miranda devoured while on a vacation and metamorphosed into the rap musical “Hamilton,” which became a cultural and commercial juggernaut. Chernow got his start writing books about the Morgans, the Warburgs and other financial dynasties, including a life of John D. Rockefeller, before moving on to even more conspicuous figures such as Hamilton, George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. Many of his books have been best sellers, and his biography of Washington won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. He is probably, alongside Walter Isaacson, the best-known biographer of his time.
The crucial moments in most biographies tend to arrive early, when a life begins to deviate from those around it — those moments when the future forks, when there’s a sheep-versus-goat separation. The biggest mistake Chernow makes is to blow through the vital first third of Twain’s life in a fleet 150 or so pages. This period includes the footloose, incident-packed childhood in slave-owning Hannibal, Mo., that informed both “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and his masterpiece, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It includes the feverish years when Twain was soaking up America’s vicissitudes as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, time he funneled into the spooky and incandescent “Life on the Mississippi.” It includes his journey out West, sometimes prospecting in Nevada, which became “Roughing It,” and the around-the-world, seat-of-the-pants travels that he reworked into “The Innocents Abroad.” This is an imposing cargo of experience that Chernow never fully inhabits — it’s all over in what seems like a series of postcards.
Twain is married to Olivia Langdon and has settled down by Page 166 of Chernow’s book. He is 34 and will live to be 74. Here is when the alert reader, weighing the left and right sides of the elephantine volume in his lap, notices there are still 850 pages to go. How will the author fill them? There is writing to be done and lecture tours to be taken; we seem to go boat by boat and hotel by hotel. There is squabbling with editors and publishers, and the decision to go into publishing himself. There are more lecture tours, and ruinous business adventures — the financial writer in Chernow is more at ease with this material. His Twain is fundamentally a dupe, not a genius. There are cigars to be smoked, a headline-making bankruptcy and more tours. There are the interviews he tended to give while in bed. There is a complicated relationship (apparently not sexual) with the woman who became his aide-de-camp after Olivia’s death, health problems and a troubling late-life fixation on tween girls. There is a great deal about the ailments and other woes of his four children, Langdon, Susy, Clara and Jean — the last two especially.
Twain’s wife, Olivia, with their daughters, from left, Susy, Jean and Clara.Credit…Mark Twain Archive, Elmira College
The stories of Twain’s children, who either died young or suffered innumerable medical and professional setbacks, are heart-rending and hardly uninteresting. But Chernow goes so deeply into the weeds of their lives, a series of parallel hells, that this book is like a biography of Ronald Reagan that goes all in on Patti and Ron Jr., or a biography of Frank Zappa that gets lost in the life and times of Dweezil and Moon Unit.
