Mark Twain and the limits of biography

New Statesman​

12-05-2025

Photo by Circa Images / Bridgeman Images
What makes a person who they are? This is the greatest and simplest mystery of all our lives; it is a ceaseless puzzle, tormenting, and intriguing, one that we'll never solve for ourselves, nor for those closest to us. But for those we'll never meet, there is biography, that form that purports to offer a method by which to puzzle out motive and character, to reveal the soul of the subject.
But there are a couple of problems with this method, with this whole idea, which can make even thinking about the genre uncomfortable. First, the issue of evidence. In his life of Mark Twain, Ron Chernow – best known now, perhaps, for the biography of Alexander Hamilton that led to Hamilton the musical – lists the vast amount of material available to anyone interested in the most famous and influential writer in the history of the United States.
To trace the adventures of the man born in Missouri as Samuel Clemens in 1835, one may read of course his 30 books and 'several thousand' magazine articles; then, in the archive housed at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, there are 30,000 letters (from Twain and his family and written to them), 46 notebooks and no fewer than 600 manuscripts left unpublished at his death. 'Perhaps no other American author can boast such a richly documented record,' Chernow notes.
If you've ever written a letter or kept a notebook yourself, you'll know how little of our lives makes it into what might be called a record. We are heartbeats and breath, and most of what builds us vanishes forever, whoever we are. And fame casts a long shadow. As Chernow writes, when Jane Clemens was asked what distinguished her brilliant son Sam from other children, she said that 'when he had gone anywhere, if only downtown, when he came home all the children would gather around to hear what he had to tell. He knew even then how to make things interesting. She also said that when she saw a crowd running, she didn't ask what was the matter, but 'What has Sam done now?'.'
This is taken, the notes tell us, from 'More Twain Recollections', in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4 June 1944. Twain died in 1910. Here is a yarn that shows the boy who would become Twain as we (and his mother, and those readers in 1944) would wish to see him. This is not a criticism of Chernow or his method; it's just unavoidable when you apply any method in attempting to piece together a life.
And Twain's was an extraordinary life. Born into a loveless marriage and precarious respectability – and into a family with a history of slaveholding – Clemens's determination to create himself has become, for good or ill, a measure of what it means to be an American. With his life as much as his writing, he 'impressed himself upon the world as a personality as much as an author, a singular, salty, colourful figure who was instantly recognisable, defining a new form of celebrity. He had elevated himself into a character superior to any of his creations.'
Chernow shows us a boy addicted to narrative from an early age. As a printer's apprentice, or 'devil', at a local newspaper, he ('supposedly', the author qualifies) caught hold of a scrap of paper on the street, a fragment of a life of Joan of Arc. This 'betrayed his first spark of literary interest', Chernow writes, but his understanding of the power of the voice came from summers spent listening to tales spun by 'Old Uncle Dan'l', an enslaved man kept in bondage at his uncle's home. 'We would huddle close about the old man, & begin to shudder with the first familiar words; & under the spell of his impressive delivery we always fell a prey to that climax at the end when the rigid black shape in the twilight sprang at us with a shout,' Twain wrote in a letter decades later.
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The author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would base the character of Jim in part on Old Uncle Dan'l, and Chernow traces thoughtfully the evolution of Twain in the matter of race. As a youth, during the Civil War, he briefly enlisted in a Confederate militia, but later in life would become a powerful advocate for the rights of black Americans. In the 1880s he put a young black man, Warner T McGuinn, through Yale Law School; McGuinn would go on to mentor a young lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, who would argue Brown vs Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954, and who would become the high court's first African-American justice.
Is it fair to call Twain an enlightened man? It would seem so, in Chernow's telling. He resisted the prejudices that could have sprung from his upbringing; in the early years of the 20th century, he deplored the imperialist tendencies of President Theodore Roosevelt. Yet Chernow's biography makes it challenging, at times, to consider the question, because it is so focused on Twain that the historical context in which he lived can recede into the background.
Can a biography be too closely focused on its subject? But Twain is so much a part of the history of the United States, the 74 years of his life spanning the era in which the country became itself. I am willing to allow, certainly, that this may be a matter of personal taste. Chernow dives minutely into Twain's marriage to his beloved Livy, assesses his struggles as a parent and provides heart-rending detail, for instance, on the suffering of his youngest daughter, Jean, incapacitated by seizures.
But when it comes to the wider framework around Twain's life, the deeper context of the political and financial standing and crises of the United States – a country nearly catastrophically divided in his lifetime, the legacy of which we all live with still – one wishes for more. It's eye-popping to read of Twain's almost comic inability to resist any huckster with a gleam in his eye; he married well, and made plenty of money from his writing, but he lost astonishing sums in speculation. A fiendishly complex typesetting machine, a contraption for printing carpets, a patent digestive nostrum: the very same fellow who wrote The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg fell for them all. Yet I would have read less about Jean's affliction and more about other chumps, great and small, who lost fortunes at the time, and what that said about Twain's native land. Twain was the publisher of the memoirs of General (later President) Ulysses S Grant: but most of what we hear about Grant is Twain's opinion of him. (Chernow is also the biographer of Grant. Maybe he'd had enough of him.)
Strange to read a biography of Mark Twain – that most vibrantly entertaining of writers and personalities – and feel a little weary of him by page 900 or so. At the end of his life, his (apparently non-sexual) obsession with very young girls springs disturbingly to the fore: he called them his 'angelfish', and once they turned 16, he lost interest and dropped them (there really was a 'school' of angelfish) with stunning abruptness. Chernow doesn't excuse Twain but notes that his subject's apparent thirst for a kind of pure, uncorrupted adoration was bottomless. Despite his love for his wife, he never recovered from his boyhood crushes; and, as Chernow notes, his greatest works are marked by a distinct lack of rounded, adult female characters.
And yet those works are not the lesser. They are the wellspring from which the American literary voice – colloquial, powerful, uninhibited, adventurous – sprang, and finally no biography can do that voice justice. Best, finally, to hear it for yourself.
Mark Twain
Ron Chernow
Allen Lane, 1,200pp, £40
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[See also: Joan Didion without her style]
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