A lesson learned from MARK TWAIN, by Ron Chernow

Mark Twain was us Americans—for better and worse. 

Today’s historical lesson is standard inspirational quote stuff, but it also gives me a chance to rave about Ron Chernow’s new Mark Twain biography, perhaps the single biggest book I’ve ever finished (1032 pages)! Prior to Chernow’s book I hadn’t revisited Twain’s writing in decades, and while I was aware of him as one of America’s most legendary authors, I actually knew every little about the details of his life and beliefs. Twain was a massive personality who was a perfect symbol of a nation that was achieving greatness as a world power while also suffering from crippling flaws, and some of America’s best and worst impulses could be seen in Twain. He also was a man who often deeply disappointed those who were personally closest to him, even as he became a beloved national icon. 

Twain (whose birth name was, of course, Samuel Clemens) was born into relative poverty in the slave state of Missouri, and spent his early years exploring the Mississippi River as a steamboat pilot, a profession he remembered as the best years of his life (all his decades of writing success notwithstanding). His father was a cold, depressing man who never achieved everything in life he had wanted to (he had bet on getting rich on land purchases that proved worthless), and so Twain’s primary inspiration was his firecracker of a mother, whom Twain later claimed would have been a far better writer than he had society given her the proper encouragement. A young man at the outbreak of the Civil War, Twain briefly volunteered for the Confederate army, a decision that was partly driven by the community pressure of his fellow slaveowners, and one that he showed deep ambivalence about for the rest of his life. Partly to escape the chaos of the war, Twain followed his brother out to what was then the far West (the new states of California and Nevada), and there gained a deep appreciation for all the colorful characters that made up 19th century American society. These youthful experiences proved an inspiration for Twain’s writings for the rest of his life, as he wrote a series of novels and short stories that would become standard to American English curriculum all the way up to the present day. 

Chernow dives into all of Twain’s writings (as well as his dozens of brilliant quotes and observations about everyday life), and it has given me a new appreciation for the vastness of Twain’s literary output. However, I was even more fascinated by Twain the man—he was filled with brilliant analysis of life and human behavior while being shockingly susceptible to fraudsters and swindles, and he had strongly progressive and even radical beliefs for his era, while also showing an obsession with accumulating wealth and asserting control over many of the women in his life. 

Twain, to his credit, grew a great deal from his rather provincial and bigoted upbringing. Having grown up in a slave state and been raised by a family of slaveowners, Twain became deeply ashamed of America’s history of white supremacy, a feeling which only seemed to intensify in him as he aged. He went out of his way to elevate the careers of black artists and intellectuals, and often made African-Americans the most deep and sympathetic characters in his writings (crude racist language notwithstanding, which he often used to mock his white characters). He felt deeply guilty for the racial violence that permeated his era, and as he laid dying proclaimed that humanity would never truly advance until we had figured out how to rectify the crimes of racial prejudice. He denounced the nation’s anti-Asian immigrant laws, and even in his final years denounced a lifelong hatred for Native Americans that he had inherited from his frontier upbringing. 

With all of his literary and political virtues, Twain was also a deeply flawed man whose personal failings could be disappointing, even appalling when viewed from a modern lens. His lifelong support of women’s suffrage notwithstanding, he was generally awful to the women in his life. He undoubtedly loved his wife Livy and was deeply devoted to her, but he also had a retrograde view of women as chaste, innocent beings who were best stuck in perpetual adolescence. He never had allegations of sexual misconduct against him, yet his lifelong preference for the company of teenage girls raised more than a few eyebrows, especially as he would keep letters and portraits of them (his generally immature, sexless correspondence with them suggested a deep level of Victorian-era sexual repression). Part of his obsession with teen girls might have reflected his own deep disappointments as a father—all three of his daughters suffered from various physical and psychological maladies, and he was generally awful at being there for them, often pawning them off on various doctors and guardians while he would disappear from their lives for months and years at a time. I especially found the story of his youngest daughter Jean heartbreaking, a severe epileptic at a time when there were no effective treatments for such maladies. Twain had her virtually exiled throughout her life to various treatment centers, partly because he could not bear witnessing her condition himself, He finally began to reconnect with her and allow her back into his life in his final years, only for her to shockingly die after a seizure in a bathtub just as Twain himself was beginning to die (it was a real gut-punch of a revelation that I did not see coming at the end of the book, and Twain understandably gave up afterward). 

This blog is running long now so I’ll wind it down, but Chernow’s Twain book is filled with fascinating details and stories, such as how he almost bankrupted himself investing his life savings into a printing press which everyone around him realized was totally impractical (again, his lifelong weakness for hucksters), or how Twain’s volcanic anger lead him to hold lifelong grudges against those who wronged him even when he would  have been better off forgetting and forgiving. Learning about Twain has been a fascinating early summer project, and I highly encourage everyone with the time and inclination to check out Chernow’s massive new study of him. Twain's brilliant observations about the world, his dark slaveowning past followed by his shockingly progressive racial politics, his support for women's rights combined with his own shabby treatment of them, his satirizing of American wealth while also obsessing over being rich and falling for frauds--he was the perfect symbol of all of the good and bad of America as it entered on to the world stage.